H.p. Lovecraft Quotes

I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

The cloudless day is richer at its close;A golden glory settles on the lea;Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool reposeTo mellowing landscape, and to calming sea.And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light,The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines;Freed form the noonday glare, the favour’d sightIncreasing grace in earth and sky divines.But ere the purest radiance crowns the green,Or fairest lustre fills th’ expectant grove,The twilight thickens, and the fleeting sceneLeaves but a hallow’d memory of love!

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I know always that I am an outsider, a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I have seen the dark universe yawningWhere the black planets roll without aim,Where they roll in their horror unheeded,Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

~ H.p. Lovecraft

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”— “Supernatural Horror in Literature

~ H.p. Lovecraft

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!

~ H.p. Lovecraft

It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it, from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!

~ H.p. Lovecraft

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of ide

~ H.p. Lovecraft

It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man, and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of the ocean.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things...

~ H.p. Lovecraft

I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . .

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Art has been wrecked by a complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to each man only a rubbish-heap limned by his individual perception. It will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realisation that complete consciousness and truth are themselves valueless, and that to acquire any genuine artistic titillation we must artificially invent limitations of consciousness and feign a pattern of life common to all mankind--most naturally the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition first gave us.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly, these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.

~ H.p. Lovecraft

That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.

~ H.p. Lovecraft