Top 42 Macabre Quotes & Sayings

Before my time on 'RuPaul's Drag Race,' Halloween was my favorite day of the year since I was a little kid. It's the day we worship the macabre and live vicariously through the costumes that we wear.

It is true that as people, we tend to remember only the positive. With time, the grim details fade away, and as a species we survive on this notion. In our desire to gloss over the undeniable macabre parts of our American history, we forget. That amnesia manifests itself, especially when dealing with the plight of black men.

It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.

I almost moved into a place over a funeral parlor. My father said, 'That's just too macabre,' but I thought I'd be embracing my mortality. I told him it would keep me grounded - like when people get skull tattoos.

People are always trying to be on top. And not always with a macabre agenda, but I think that people are desperately trying to remain in control, rather than being honest.

People look at me as if I were some sort of monster, but I can't think why. In my macabre pictures, I have either been a monster-maker or a monster-destroyer, but never a monster. Actually, I'm a gentle fellow. Never harmed a fly. I love animals, and when I'm in the country I'm a keen bird-watcher.

I don't really think I am interested in the macabre, but I am curious about death. That's normal... The only certainty in life is that we're all going to die. It would be unnatural not to think about death once in a while.

Those films that really speak to the primal fear that we, as human beings, have about the unknown have always intrigued me. That's the really scary thing, not the slasher, macabre movies. It's the ones that deal with the inner fear: the unknown realms and the mysticisms that are scary.

What I like about the Carpenter take on The Thing is the fact that it just has so much suspense. It seemed like a different story, with the horror elements. Those films that really speak to the primal fear that we, as human beings, have about the unknown have always intrigued me. That's the really scary thing, not the slasher, macabre movies.

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

I have a taste for the macabre. I really am not drawn to imagery that is pretty, things that are just pretty. I’m drawn to things that challenge you, that make you nervous, that make you uncomfortable.

Uncle Fester always intrigued me. I certainly always enjoyed his kind of humor. He's just full of mischief in a kind of macabre way. I don't see anything twisted about it. It's sort of ridiculous and wacky. It's sort of fun.

Still, I look down, and the grass is so green, I cannot understand how it does not wither and die with sorrow. But against the emerald carpet, the warriors make war, and it is like a dance, almost beautiful, always macabre. The noise brings me back, the fearsome noise of swords striking swords, a metallic clanging that rings in my ears, echoing and echoing the fearsome din of men screaming and crying as they meet the sharp ends of blades.

Rising from the dead? Glowing at sunrise? What did that make him, the god of cheerful mornings and macabre surprises?

It doesnt seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

I'm not a particularly macabre person.

'Dance Macabre' feels like one of those songs that you want to play forever.

Within comedy, macabre is the root, and a lot of art - Goya, Bosch, Dali - is macabre. Even Van Gogh, if he paints a chair, there's an element of the macabre within it.

Can you imagine having a love affair going on and on decade after decade? Macabre.

Temptation said that we all dream of committing crimes, but that only the unbalanced make that macabre idea a reality.

Rather than a taste for the macabre, I like the full range of human emotion in a story, which means darkness and light. It means warmth, but it also potentially means scares.

Working with Chaplin was very amusing and strange. His films are so funny, but working with him, I found him to be a very serious man. Whereas the films of Hitchcock are macabre, he could be a very funny man to work with, always telling jokes and holding court. Of course, when I worked with Charlie he was getting older.

I try to offset any tendency towards the macabre with humour. As I see it, this is a typically English form of humour. It's a piece with such jokes as the one about the man who was being led to the gallows to be hanged. He looked at the trap door in the gallows, which was flimsily constructed, and he asked in some alarm, 'I say, is that thing safe?

A trip to the hospital is always a descent into the macabre. I have never trusted a place with shiny floors.

'A High Wind in Jamaica' is like those books you used to read under the covers with a flashlight - only infinitely more delicious... and macabre.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art some time ago held a display of contemporary art at which $52,000 was awarded to American sculptors, painters, and artists in allied fields. The award for the best painting went to the canvas of an Illinois artist. It was described as "a macabre, detailed work showing a closed door bearing a funeral wreath." Equally striking was the work's title: "That which I should have done, I did not do."

Ray Bradbury's connections to fantasy, space, cinema, to the macabre and the melancholy, were all born of his years spent running, jumping, galloping through the woods, across the fields, and down the brick-paved streets of Waukegan.

It doesn't seem to me strange that children should like the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden.

I've always loved horror, I've always loved collecting, I've always loved weird and macabre things, and I've always loved conventions. So what could be better than having your own Fear FestEviL where all those great and crazy things can be enjoyed by like-minded people under one pretty cool roof? Nothing!

I think most of us are fascinated by the macabre and by the weird and even the nastiness that comes along.

Chad Michael Ward is a master of the storytelling craft. His imagery, both still and moving, reaches deep into the darkest corners of the mind, combining the macabre and the sensuous Revealing humanity's secret daydream atrocities. CMW taps into our most excitable of emotions with a blend of fear and human sexuality. Like an erotic car accident we can not look away from.

I'm a really big fan of all things macabre in general; Halloween happens to be my favorite holiday.

I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.

When I was young, my favorite picture book was 'Fletcher and Zenobia,' written by Edward Gorey and illustrated by Victoria Chess. It's long out of print now, but its mix of macabre humor and 1960s psychedelia made it a perfect children's book for the times.

Go out and find a copy of 'The Shrinking Of Treehorn' and its sequel, 'Treehorn's Treasure.' Written by Florence Parry Heide and illustrated by the great Edward Gorey, master of the gothic and the macabre, these books are small masterpieces.

Every generation has a macabre notion that wars, government prohibition, natural disasters or mankind itself could be the downfall of society and the world as a whole.

Sometimes I am a collector of data, and only a collector, and am likely to be gross and miserly, piling up notes, pleased with merely numerically adding to my stores. Other times I have joys, when unexpectedly coming upon an outrageous story that may not be altogether a lie, or upon a macabre little thing that may make some reviewer of my more or less good works mad. But always there is present a feeling of unexplained relations of events that I note, and it is this far-away, haunting, or often taunting, awareness, or suspicion, that keeps me piling on.

I find the macabre fascinating; it's all over history.

Argentina is really in a different category because they butchered all their Indian or indigenous people in the war of the desert in 1850s. Which sets them aside from their neighbors in a macabre way.

I like the influence of the macabre, but I don't believe in ghosts.

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.