Charles Dickens Quotes About Terror

• The young woman who brought me acquainted with Captain Murderer had a fiendish enjoyment of my terrors, and used to begin, I remember - as a sort of introductory overture - by clawing the air with both hands, and uttering a long low hollow groan. So acutely did I suffer from this ceremony in combination with this infernal Captain, that I sometimes used to plead I thought I was hardly strong enough and old enough to hear the story again just yet.

  Charles Dickens

  Strong, Air, Hands

  Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: The Uncommercial Traveller”, p.148, Cosimo, Inc.

• An unfinished coffin on black tressels, which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the direction of the dismal object: from which he almost expected to see some frightful form slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror.

  Charles Dickens

  Eye, Mad, Black

  Charles Dickens (2003). “Oliver Twist”, p.53, Collector's Library

• One thing about this face was very strange and startling. You could not look upon it in its most cheerful mood without feeling that it had some extraordinary capacity of expressing terror. It was not on the surface. It was in no one feature that it lingered. You could not take the eyes or mouth, or lines upon the cheek, and say, if this or that were otherwise, it would not be so. Yet there it always lurked-something for ever dimly seen, but ever there, and never absent for a moment.

  Charles Dickens

  Character, Eye, Interesting

  Charles Dickens (1868). “Barnaby Rudge, And, Hard Times: With Ten Illustrations”, p.26

You May Also Like:

Mark Twain

William Shakespeare

Jane Austen

Edgar Allan Poe

Leo Tolstoy

Oscar Wilde

Charlotte Bronte