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The King in Yellow quotes
18 quotes from The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers. Source: Project Gutenberg e-text #8492 (public domain in the USA), the text this site’s reader shows. Each quote is copied exactly from that text and links to its passage in the reader; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against the reader’s text.
“The ambition of Caesar and of Napoleon pales before that which could not rest until it had seized the minds of men and controlled even their unborn thoughts,” said Mr. Wilde.
— Mr. Wilde
“to come is easy and takes hours; to go is different—and may take centuries.”
— Spoken by a character
Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa.
Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink behind the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa.
— Spoken by a character
“Come and see my rose-coloured bath full of death!”
— Spoken by a character
“He is a king whom emperors have served.”
— Spoken by a character
Songs that the Hyades shall sing, Where flap the tatters of the King, Must die unheard in Dim Carcosa.
Song of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa.
This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men’s thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask.
“I am content to serve him,” I replied.
— Spoken by a character
At last I was King, King by my right in Hastur, King because I knew the mystery of the Hyades, and my mind had sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I was King! The first grey pencillings of dawn would raise a tempest which would shake two hemispheres.
Woe! woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!
— Spoken by a character
The mask of self-deception was no longer a mask for me, it was a part of me. Night lifted it, laying bare the stifled truth below; but there was no one to see except myself, and when the day broke the mask fell back again of its own accord.
I thought, too, of the King in Yellow wrapped in the fantastic colours of his tattered mantle, and that bitter cry of Cassilda, “Not upon us, oh King, not upon us!”
“Let the red dawn surmise What we shall do, When this blue starlight dies And all is through.”
— Spoken by a character
Feverishly I struggled to put it from me, but I saw the lake of Hali, thin and blank, without a ripple or wind to stir it, and I saw the towers of Carcosa behind the moon. Aldebaran, the Hyades, Alar, Hastur, glided through the cloud-rifts which fluttered and flapped as they passed like the scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow.
“The scolloped tatters of the King in Yellow must hide Yhtill forever,” he muttered, but I do not believe Vance heard him.
— Spoken by a character
“It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!”
— Spoken by a character