Monsters - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils.With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful - Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.

- Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

Late one accursed night I compounded the elements, watched them boil and smoke together in the glass, and when the ebullition had subsided, with a strong glow of courage, drank off the potion. The most racking pangs succeeded: a grinding in the bones, deadly nausea, and a horror of the spirit that cannot be exceeded at the hour of birth or death. Then these agonies began swiftly to subside, and I came to myself as if out of a great sickness. There was something strange in my sensations, something indescribably new, and, from its very novelty, incredibly sweet. I felt younger, lighter, happier in body; within I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy, a solution of the bonds of obligation, an unknown but not an innocent freedom of the soul. I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.

- Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)

No eyes could look unchanged on that slimy blob of liquid flesh and fungus and ichor, with its loathly tentacles and beaks, its blackness of corruption, its monstrous mixture of all that was obscene in the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

- Donald A.Wandrei, ''Something from Above'' (1930)

We are about to unfold the story of Frankenstein, a man of science who sought to create a man after his own image without reckoning upon God. It is one of the strangest tales ever told. It deals with the two great mysteries of creation: life and death. I think it will thrill you. It may shock you. It might even horrify you.

- Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh, Frankenstein (film, 1931)

Frankenstein: Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive . . . It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive!

- Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh, Frankenstein (film, 1931)

You have created a monster, and it will destroy you!

- Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh, Frankenstein (film, 1931)

I'm going to show you the greatest thing your eyes have ever beheld. He was a king and a god in the world he knew, but now he comes to civilization merely a captive - a show to gratify your curiosity. Ladies and gentlemen, look at Kong, the EighthWonder of theWorld!

- James Ashmore Creelman and Ruth Rose, King Kong (film, 1933)

To a new world of gods and monsters!

- William Hurlbut, Bride of Frankenstein (film, 1935)

It crawled out of the darkness and hot damp mold into the cool of a morning. It was huge. It was lumped and crusted with its own hateful substances, and pieces of it dropped off as it went its way, dropped off and lay writhing, and stilled, and sank putrescent into the forest loam.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''It'' (1940)

The creature crept. It whimpered from fear and pain, a thing, slobbering sound horrible to hear. Shapeless, formless thing yet changing shape and form with every jerky movement. It crept along the corridor of the space freighter, fighting the terrible urge of its elements to take the shape of its surroundings. A gray blob of disintegrating stuff, it rolled, flowed, dissolved, every movement an agony of struggle against the abnormal need to become a stable shape.

- A. E. van Vogt, ''Vault of the Beast'' (1940)

My heart is good. But I am a monster.

- Jean Cocteau, Beauty and the Beast (film, 1946), translated by Francis Howard (1946)

The foghorn blew. And the monster answered. A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The foghorn blew. The monster roared again. The foghorn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth, and the sound that came from it was the sound of the foghorn itself.

- Ray Bradbury, ''The Fog Horn'' (1951)

Ostrow: The Krell forgot one thing - Adams: Yes, what? Ostrow: Monsters, John. Monsters from the id!

- Cyril Hume, Forbidden Planet (film, 1956)

We're all part monsters in our subconscious, so we have laws and religion.

- Cyril Hume, Forbidden Planet (film, 1956)

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within. [. . .] I have no mouth. And I must scream.

- Harlan Ellison, ''I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream'' (1967)

Make all the monsters you wish. The world's already full of them.

- Edgar Pangborn, ''The Night Wind'' (1974)

''It's not a man's skin that makes him a god - or a monster,'' Fallatha said quietly. ''It's what lies beneath the skin, behind the eyes.''

- Joan D. Vinge, ''The Storm King'' (1980)

One, two, Freddy's coming for you! Three, four, better lock your door! Five, six, grab your crucifix! Seven, eight, gotta stay up late! Nine, ten, never sleep again!

- Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street (film, 1984)

I'm a mog: half man, half dog. I'm my own best friend!

- Mel Brooks, Thomas Meehan, and Ronny Graham, Spaceballs (film, 1987)

Some things deserved to be called ''it.''

- Octavia E. Butler, Dawn (1987)

I knew more than most how the mind conjures up monsters.

- Jane Yolen, ''The Quiet Monk'' (1988)

I have never understood the practice in some cultures of describing ferocious creatures in an attempt to lull children to sleep.

- Lisa Klink, ''Innocence,'' episode of Star Trek: Voyager (1996)

''Monsters are made,'' Plass said with a grimace, clasping her Bible, ''not born.''

- Greg Bear, ''TheWay of All Ghosts'' (1999)