H.P. Lovecraft Quotes

I think drink is ugly, and therefore I have nothing to do with it.

Do not call up that which you cannot put down.

Ye have done much to bring about the indescribable return. May ye go mad quickly and not be devoured.

he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment;

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

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.

Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.

Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.

Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I

bhole whose form no man might see.

God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad,

nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space - their

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!

knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces. Yet

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

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.

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.

In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.

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

Life is a hideous thing.

These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.

Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws.

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.

My eldest cat, "Nigger-Man," was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts;

Where does madness leave off and reality begin?

I like coffee exceedingly...

Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point.

You could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.

Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts.

Thirst had driven him into the desert again,

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

We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn't much.

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

This very morning, an hour agone, he has mounted his white ass for the return journey to Vyones.

a new chill from afar out whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it. Nor

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises ...

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

Who knows the end? What

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.

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

He was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become and empty sound.

The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane,

So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.

They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods.

My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.

The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor.

Horrors, I believe, should be original - the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence.

A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs.

Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly,

This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates.

Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed.

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

Pleasure to me is wonder - the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.

Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you.

My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.

For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.

Many would have disliked to live, if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and a scholar and had not minded.

I could not write about 'ordinary people' because I am not in the least interested in them.

In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming

Damn it, it wasn't quite fresh enough!

Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs;

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.

As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.
- Through the Gates of the Silver Key

If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,

Again there was silence - a silence as of consummated Evil brooding above its unnamable triumph.

From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came,

function - thoughtless, careless, and liquorish,

and mentally aberrant type.

the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin.

When you can hear a spider walk across the floor, you know it's time to keep your socks on. Thank God for insecticide.

Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word "eldritch" so many times now that I think about it ...

In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.

Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.

All which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead,

It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine.

Despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dreams

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

Sounds - possibly musical - heard in the night from other worlds or realms of being.

I am Providence.

My youngest boy went mad. He sits drooling on the porch, trying to play the cat like an accordion. He's been scratched some.

Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity