“Don’t say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I’ve been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one. When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin. I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth.”
Some things, when you say them out loud with the right delivery, sound a lot more ominous than they should. Even some nursery rhymes.
E.g.:
Solomon Grundy
Born on Monday
Christened on Tuesday
Married on Wednesday
Took ill Thursday
Grew worse Friday
Died on Saturday
Buried on Sunday
And that was the end
Of Solomon Grundy.
Or even worse:
This is the knife with the handle of horn
That killed the cock that crowed in the morn
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn
That married the groom all tattered and torn
Unto the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow
That sat on the dog
That killed the cat
That ate the rat
That turned the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built.
“Something bumped into me–something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living…Why shouldn’t rats eat a de la Poer as a de la Poer eats forbidden things?..The war ate my boy, damn them all…and the Yanks ate Carfax with flames and burnt Grandsire Delapore and the secret…No, no, I tell you, I am not that daemon swineherd in the twilit grotto! It was not Edward Norrys’ fat face on that flabby fungous thing! Who says I am a de la Poer? He lived, but my boy died!..Shall a Norrys hold the land of a de la Poer?..It’s voodoo, I tell you…that spotted snake…Curse you, Thornton, I’ll teach you to faint at what my family do!..'Sblood, thou stinkard, I’ll learn ye how to gust…wolde ye swynke me thilke wys?..Magna Mater! Magna Mater!..Atys…Dia ad aghaidh’s ad aodaun…agus bas dunarch ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa!..Ungl unl… rrlh…chchch…”
– “The Rats in the Walls,” by H.P. Lovecraft
I like better Vin’s retort to Calvera. “We deal in lead, friend.”
From real life, Leonidas’ reply to Xerxes’ demand at Thermopylae that the Spartans surrender their arms. “Come take them.” (Molon labe)
EVIL ANGEL. Now, Faustus, let thine eyes with horror stare
[Hell is discovered.]
Into that vast perpetual torture-house:
There are the Furies tossing damned souls
On burning forks; there bodies boil 256 in lead;
There are live quarters broiling on the coals,
That ne’er can die; this ever-burning chair
Is for o’er-tortur’d souls to rest them in;
These that are fed with sops of flaming fire,
Were gluttons, and lov’d only delicates,
And laugh’d to see the poor starve at their gates:
But yet all these are nothing; thou shalt see
Ten thousand tortures that more horrid be.
FAUSTUS. O, I have seen enough to torture me!
EVIL ANGEL. Nay, thou must feel them, taste the smart of all:
He that loves pleasure must for pleasure fall:
And so I leave thee, Faustus, till anon;
Then wilt thou tumble in confusion.
– The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe
Ghost.
I am thy father’s spirit;
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confin’d to wastein fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purg’d away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul; freeze thy young blood;
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres;
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porcupine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.–
– Hamlet
"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE. "
– “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” by Harlan Ellison
That is the true meaning of Christmas! 
“So you spit upon my offer? You have wasted my time. For that, your game ends. I think I’ll start with the green one. The shag upon his lip will make a fine trophy!”
…
“And so I strike, like an unseen dodgeball at an echoing gymnasium!”
–Dimentio, from Super Paper Mario
“‘To the pain’ means that the first thing you lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists, next your nose… The next thing you lose will be your left eye, followed by your right… Your ears you keep, and I’ll tell you why: so that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish; every babe that weeps at your approach; every woman who cries out, ‘Dear God! What is that thing?’ will echo in your perfect ears. That is what ‘to the pain’ means; it means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery, forever.”
– The Princess Bride
Little did he know . . .
" . . . But trick us again, and your suffering will be legendary EVEN IN HELL!"
– Hellraiser II
Three from Charles Dickens:
“If Bedlam gates had been flung open wide, there would not have issued forth such maniacs as the frenzy of that night had made. There were men there who danced and trampled on the beds of flowers as though they trod down human enemies, and wrenched them from their stalks, like savages who twisted human necks. There were men who cast their lighted torches in the air, and suffered them to fall upon their heads and faces, blistering the skin with deep unseemly burns. There were men who rushed up to the fire, and paddled in it with their hands as if in water; and others who were restrained by force from plunging in, to gratify their deadly longing. On the skull of one drunken lad–not twenty, by his looks–who lay upon the ground with a bottle to his mouth, the lead from the roof came streaming down in a shower of liquid fire, white hot, melting his head like wax…But of all the howling throng not one learnt mercy from, or sickened at, these sights; nor was the fierce, besotted, senseless rage of one man glutted.”
– Barnaby Rudge
“There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and they were dancing like five thousand demons…They danced to the popular Revolution song, keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison… They advanced, retreated, struck at one another’s hands, clutched at one another’s heads, spun round alone, caught one another, and spun around in pairs, until many of them dropped…Suddenly they stopped again, paused, struck out the time afresh, forming into lines the width of the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high up, swooped screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport–a something, once innocent, delivered over to all devilry.”
– A Tale of Two Cities
“But the pupils—the young noblemen! How the last faint traces of hope, the remotest glimmering of any good to be derived from his efforts in this den, faded from the mind of Nicholas as he looked in dismay around! Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, children with the countenances of old men, deformities with irons upon their limbs, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies, all crowded on the view together; there were the bleared eye, the hare-lip, the crooked foot, and every ugliness or distortion that told of unnatural aversion conceived by parents for their offspring, or of young lives which, from the earliest dawn of infancy, had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect. There were little faces which should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering; there was childhood with the light of its eye quenched, its beauty gone, and its helplessness alone remaining; there were vicious-faced boys, brooding, with leaden eyes, like malefactors in a jail; and there were young creatures on whom the sins of their frail parents had descended, weeping even for the mercenary nurses they had known, and lonesome even in their loneliness. With every kindly sympathy and affection blasted in its birth, with every young and healthy feeling flogged and starved down, with every revengeful passion that can fester in swollen hearts, eating its evil way to their core in silence, what an incipient Hell was breeding here!”]
– Nicholas Nickleby
“Keep him awake until he dies.”
– Podkayne of Mars, by Robert A. Heinlein
One of the last lines of Mother 3, and a HUGE spoiler if you haven’t played it:
[ul]
[li]Claus fired a bolt of lightning.[/li][li]The Franklin Badge reflected the lightning![/li][/ul]
And it manages to be incredibly ominous without actually being by anybody…it’s just the automatic battle messages.
‘I dun’t keer what folks think–ef Lavinny’s boy looked like his pa, he wouldn’t look like nothin’ ye expeck. Ye needn’t think the only folks is the folks hereabouts. Lavinny’s read some, an’ has seed some things the most o’ ye only tell abaout. I calc’late her man is as good a husban’ as ye kin find this side of Aylesbury; an’ ef ye knowed as much abaout the hills as I dew, ye wouldn’t ast no better church weddin’ nor her’n. Let me tell ye suthin–some day yew folks’ll hear a child o’ Lavinny’s a-callin’ its father’s name on the top o’ Sentinel Hill!’
– “The Dunwich Horror,” by H.P. Lovecraft
“Nor is it to be thought (ran the text as Armitage mentally translated it) that man is either the oldest or the last of earth’s masters, or that the common bulk of life and substance walks alone. The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them, they walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They had trod earth’s fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. By Their smell can men sometimes know Them near, but of Their semblance can no man know, saving only in the features of those They have begotten on mankind; and of those are there many sorts, differing in likeness from man’s truest eidolon to that shape without sight or substance which is Them. They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices, and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath? The ice desert of the South and the sunken isles of Ocean hold stones whereon Their seal is engraver, but who hath seen the deep frozen city or the sealed tower long garlanded with seaweed and barnacles? Great Cthulhu is Their cousin, yet can he spy Them only dimly. Iä! Shub-Niggurath! As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold. Yog-Sothoth is the key to the gate, whereby the spheres meet. Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again.”
– Ditto
‘You asked me once,’ said O’Brien, ‘what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.’
‘The worst thing in the world,’ said O’Brien, ‘varies from individual to individual. It may be burial alive, or death by fire, or by drowning, or by impalement, or fifty other deaths. There are cases where it is some quite trivial thing, not even fatal.’
‘In your case,’ said O’Brien, ‘the worst thing in the world happens to be rats.’
‘Do you remember,’ said O’Brien, ‘the moment of panic that used to occur in your dreams? There was a wall of blackness in front of you, and a roaring sound in your ears. There was something terrible on the other side of the wall. You knew that you knew what it was, but you dared not drag it into the open. It was the rats that were on the other side of the wall.’
‘By itself,’ he said, ‘pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable–something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be destroyed. It is the same with the rats. For you, they are unendurable. They are a form of pressure that you cannot withstand, even if you wished to. You will do what is required of you.’
‘The rat,’ said O’Brien, still addressing his invisible audience, ‘although a rodent, is carnivorous. You are aware of that. You will have heard of the things that happen in the poor quarters of this town. In some streets a woman dare not leave her baby alone in the house, even for five minutes. The rats are certain to attack it. Within quite a small time they will strip it to the bones. They also attack sick or dying people. They show astonishing intelligence in knowing when a human being is helpless.’
‘I have pressed the first lever,’ said O’Brien. ‘You understand the construction of this cage. The mask will fit over your head, leaving no exit. When I press this other lever, the door of the cage will slide up. These starving brutes will shoot out of it like bullets. Have you ever seen a rat leap through the air? They will leap on to your face and bore straight into it. Sometimes they attack the eyes first. Sometimes they burrow through the cheeks and devour the tongue.’
‘It was a common punishment in Imperial China,’ said O’Brien as didactically as ever.
– Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
“Now listen to me. I like you. The consequence is that it would annoy me for just about two and a half minutes if I heard that you had died in torments. Well, if you ever tell the police or any human soul about us, I shall have that two and a half minutes of discomfort. On your discomfort I will not dwell. Good day. Mind the step.”
– “The Man Who Was Thursday,” by G.K. Chesterton
If you were not my father, O ever-living Tisroc," said Rabadash, grinding his teeth, “I should say that was the word of a coward.”
“And if you were not my son, O most inflammable Rabadash,” replied his father, “your life would be short and your death slow when you had said it.”
– The Horse and His Boy, by C.S. Lewis
An outtake from Oliver Stone’s Nixon (at 7:12), spoken by the director of the CIA:
“So President Kennedy . . . thought.”