Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.

I’m possibly a very morbid person but I think about death a lot.

We need to be reminded that there is nothing morbid about honestly confronting the fact of life’s end, and preparing for it so that we may go gracefully and peacefully.

Many of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges

Worry is a morbid anticipation of events which never happen.

The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life’s sores the better.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both.

One is not converted to christianity; one must be morbid enough for it.

I keep thinking about blood, I dream about it. Wake up thinking about it. Pretty soon I’ll be writing morbid emo poetry about it.

Excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness.

Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

So you go away from where you were afraid. Some stay; some go; it’s a big difference, leaving the humiliations of childhood, the morbid fear. We didn’t have much to say to each other, the ones that left and the ones that stayed. Children get shamed by fear but you can’t tell the adults that; they don’t care. They make children into dead things like they are. If there’s something left alive in you, you run. You run from the poor little child on her knees; fear burned the skin off all right; she’s still on her knees, dead and raw and tender.

There is a struggle inside you between these two parts. It’s as if at times your heart becomes a battlefield! The secret part, full of light, seems so small and weak in the face of the discouraging and morbid part, which seems enormous and overwhelming. However, if you light a small candle in a dark room, everything is lit up. It is a matter of trusting in this little light in the deepest part of your being which can gradually chase away the darkness.

The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.

[Never give up hope. Never give in to pessimism. Never despair.] No horse named Morbid ever won a race!

In a morbid condition of the brain, dreams often have a singular actuality, vividness, and extraordinary semblance of reality.

Bacteria and parasites cannot cause disease processes unless they find their own peculiar morbid soil in which to grow and multiply.

It is all well and good for children and acid freaks to believe in Santa Claus – but it is still a profoundly morbid day for us working professionals. It is unsettling to know that one out of every twenty people you meet on Xmas will be dead this time next year…. Some people can accept this, and some can’t. That is why God made whiskey, and also why Wild Turkey comes in $300 shaped canisters during most of the Christmas season…

I was a postman one Christmas and I developed a morbid fear of dogs.

One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror – for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

As there must be moderation in other things, so there must be moderation in self-criticism. Perpetual contemplation of our own actions produces a morbid consciousness, quite unlike that normal consciousness accompanying right actions spontaneously done; and from a state of unstable equilibrium long maintained by effort, there is apt to be a fall towards stable equilibrium, in which the primitive nature reasserts itself. Retrogression rather than progression may hence result.

It is a very curious thing about superstition. One would expect that the man who had once seen his morbid dreams were not fulfilled would abandon them for the future; but on the contrary they grow even stronger just as the love of gambling increases in a man who has once lost in a lottery.

Touch-me-notism that disfigures the present day Hinduism is a morbid growth.

Ever since I’ve been young I’ve been fascinated by the human body. I’ve written songs about it, but you can become quite morbid if you think about it too much – paranoid and a hypochondriac.

So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.

The children were overwhelmingly morbid. Not a single adult asked me where butterflies go when they die, but this question was more popular than pixie sticks with the under-four-foot set. I cursed parents for not preparing their children. When I was five, my mother and sister sat me up on the kitchen counter and explained the facts of life: the Easter Bunny didn’t exist, Elijah was God’s invisible friend, with any luck Nana would die soon, and if I ever saw a unicorn, I should kill it or catch it for cash. I turned out okay.

I love playing different characters and I love doing fun things and I love to entertain people, whether that be in a comedy or a drama. If I get you to laugh or I get you to cry I’m super stoked, as morbid as that might sound.

Part of my reaction to my diagnosis of infertility was deeply sarcastic and critical, part of it was morbid, part of it was numb, part of it was neurotic and desperate. To mush all of those notes together would cancel them out. I ended up just trying to keep them as separate as possible.

I didn’t think I was in a morbid mood, but it appears I am. My mind goes round and round trying to figure things out, but I always come back to the same two things: Loneliness and Death. Life ends before we figure anything out, most importantly how not to be lonely. Solitude is fine. But feeling like you have no one to love – abject lonliness – is not alright.

Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.

I have a, shall we say, morbid personality.

There’s this morbid side to the way many represent Christianity today, where you don’t smile, because it’s too serious, and you can’t expect to see God – that kind of stuff. If there is God, we must see Him, and I don’t believe in the idea you find in most churches, where they say, “No, you’re not going to see Him. He’s way up above you. Just believe what we tell you and shut up.”

My room is like an antique shop, full of junk, and weird stuff. There’s a big sword in there. And a taxidermy bird, and a couple of birdcages. And a lot of newspaper cuttings. I used to have a weird thing about cutting out morbid headlines from newspapers, and collecting them. I was fascinated with drowning, which is kind of strange.

A journal of the ‘subjective’ kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.

Death is present every day in our lives. It’s not that I take pleasure in the morbid fascination of it, but it is a fact of life.

It’s not a morbid thing, but I think I’ve never been afraid of death, which is maybe why I love writing about it.

I love mixing humor and terror, or humor and exhaustion, or even humor and despair. I’m dealing right now with a loved one with cancer, and she’s of course sad, but also telling the most disturbingly morbid jokes and puns. I love that, there’s so much humanity in being able to mock fate and hardship.

It is resignation and contentment that are best calculated to lead us safely through life. Whoever has not sufficient power to endure privations, and even suffering, can never feel that he is armor proof against painful emotions,–nay, he must attribute to himself, or at least to the morbid sensitiveness of his nature, every disagreeable feeling he may suffer.

In horror stories or in fairy tales, the fascination with the morbid is also, at least for me, a way to prepare for the unthinkable… That’s why it’s very important for me to show the artificiality of it all, because the real horrors of the world are unmatchable, and they’re too profound.  It’s much easier to absorb – to be entertained by it, but also to let it affect you psychologically – if it’s done in a fake, humorous, artificial way.

Bob Dylan seems to me a totally pernicious influence – the nasal whine of death and masochism. Certainly, this would be a more cheerful world if there were no Dylan records in it. But Dylan and his audience mirror each other, and deserve each other; as Marx said, a morbid society creates its own morbid grave-diggers.

To grieve for evils is often wrong; but it is much more wrong to grieve without them. All sorrow that lasts longer than its cause is morbid, and should be shaken off as an attack of melancholy, as the forerunner of a greater evil than poverty or pain.

Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in decades to come. It’s their past, their history we’re inventing here. And it’s not how I look now that matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-out.

No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

The fine gifts of temperament and imagination which are essential to the production of true poetry are often accompanied by morbid sensibility. The soul capable of ecstasy and transport must pay its price in suffering; he who walks upon the heights must sometimes grovel in the dust.

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.

When will you disembarrass yourselves of the lymphatic ideology of that deplorable Ruskin, which I would like to cover with so much ridicule that you would never forget it? With his morbid dream of primitive and rustic life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and legendary wool-spinners, with his hatred for the machine, steam power, and electricity, that maniac of antique simplicity is like a man who, after having reached full physical maturity, still wants to sleep in his cradle and feed himself at the breast of his decrepit old nurse in order to recover his thoughtless infancy.

To render my works properly requires a combination of extreme precision and irresistible verve, a regulated vehemence, a dreamy tenderness, and an almost morbid melancholy.

Kelso’s proposals do promise to free us from our morbid dependency on economic health through armament manufacture; they promise a way out of the welfare mess, out of foodstamps and ship subsidies, out of perpetual inflation, and they suggest a means of doing these things without being too disruptive of the wealth of five percent of the population who own the rest of us.

I think half the troubles for which men go slouching in prayer to God are caused by their intolerable pride. Many of our cares are but a morbid way of looking at our privileges. We let our blessings get mouldy, and then call them curses.