That’s not quite the sentiment we (French) take it as - today the quote means “when we’re gone, God may as well erase the entire world for all I care”, or “Damn the consequences”.
Although when Louis XV (reportedly, probably apocryphally) said it he did mean something more along the lines of “When I’m gone, this country’s going to crash and burn so hard, you guys, I’m not even kidding” i.e. “I’m the only thing holding this bitch together”. I’d say he was about right.
In his book The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson recounts a university study of psycopaths to determine if they are able to identify emotions in other people. The researcher showed one subject a photo of a person expressing fear and the subject replied: “I don’t know what emotion that is, but that’s the face everyone made just before I killed them.”
They’re coming to get you Barbara.
Who am I? I am Susan Ivanova, Commander, daughter of Andrei and Sophie Ivanov. I am the right hand of vengeance, and the boot that is going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to Earth. I am death incarnate, and the last living thing that you are ever going to see. God sent me."
My top three creepiest quotes:
“I’ve done far worse than kill you. I’ve hurt you. And I wish to go on . . . hurting you. I shall leave you as you left me. As you left her. Marooned for all eternity in the center of a dead planet . . . buried alive.”
“My pop was real big. He did like he pleased. That’s why everybody worked on him. The last time I seen my father, he was blind in the cedars from drinking. And every time he put the bottle to his mouth, he don’t suck out of it, it sucks out of him - until he shrunk so wrinkled and yellow even the dogs didn’t know him.”
“MMMbop, ba duba dop ba do bop, ba duba dop ba do bop, ba duba dop ba do, yeah yeah.”
“He looks like anybody you see on the street. But when he grins, birds fall dead off telephone lines…the grass yellows up and dies where he spits. He’s always outside. He came out of time…He has the name of a thousand demons. Jesus knocked him into a herd of pigs once. His name is Legion. He’s afraid of us…He knows magic. He can call the wolves and live in the crows…He’s the king of nowhere.”
― Stephen King, The Stand
Las puertas, están cerradas, ventanas y celosías,
No soy el amor, amante,
Soy la Muerte, Dios me envía.
Roughly translated: I ain’t your lover, Mr Zipper Problem. I am the death God has sent you.
The song is said to date back to the 1500’s when syphilis was raging in Europe.
“I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
—Genghis Khan, to the Khwarazmian Empire.
“Mess with someone who’s got nothin’ to lose, and you get what’s comin’ to ya.”
"And the silence was deeper that night across the face of the world, from pole to pole, deeper than it had ever been before in the life of the creatures that called themselves human.
“But not as deep as it would soon become.”
– Harlan Ellison, “On the Slab”
A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
If the eyes are the windows of the soul, these windows looked in on an empty room.
From Breaking Bad:
“Good luck… I guess”
Lawson the arms dealer, after selling Walter White a fully-automatic M60 and an ungodly amount of armor piercing ammunition.
This one might be more darkly-comic than scary-blood curdling, but it was one of my favorite lines in the novel Hannibal:
[spoiler]Clarice has broken up the attempt by a surviving victim of Hannibal Lecter to torture him to death in revenge. Still not out of danger, she tells him, “Do right and you’ll live through this”.
Lecter, whom we have just seen living in Florence, steeped in the medieval Roman Catholic culture which we now know has shaped him so much, replies:[/spoiler]“Spoken like a Protestant”
“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”
The last line of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved – Levi was a survivor of the Holocaust, and this was the last book he wrote before he died a mysterious death (probably suicide):
“Willingly or not we come to terms with power, forgetting that we are all in the ghetto, that the ghetto is walled in, that outside the ghetto reign the lords of death, and that close by the train is waiting.”
Samuel Jackson quoting the bible in Pulp Fiction:
From the Pink Floyd song “Hey You”:
From the King Diamond album Abigail, the first song/track “Funeral”:
“Call it.”
Anton Chigurh
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
-Edgar Allan Poe“Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.”
From a stele erected by Zhang Xianzhong, 16th century conqueror.
Good one. From one of my five favorite books.
US Admiral Harold Stark to Japanese Admiral Kichisaburo Nomura prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor:
More from Harlan Ellison:
I am the only adult here.
They have been waiting for me.
They call me father.