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H. P. Lovecraft

154 quotes

• “Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Tomb" (1917)

• “I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Dagon" - Written July 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)

• “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 (1890–1937) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Dagon" - Written July 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)

• “My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of rhythmical throbbing ... and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Transition of Juan Romero" - Written 16 Sep 1919; first published in Marginalia (1944)

• “Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1919 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Beyond the Wall of Sleep" in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6 (October 1919)

• “I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive...”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Nyarlathotep" (1920)

• “Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species — if separate species we be — for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family" - written 1920; first published in The Wolverine, No. 9 (March 1921)

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

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Temple" - Written 1920; first published in Weird Tales, 6 No. 3 (September 1925)

• “There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Street" - first published in The Wolverine, No. 8 (December 1920)<!-- p. 2-12.)

• “When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Ex Oblivione" - First published in The United Amateur, 20, No. 4 (March 1921)<!-- p. 59-60

• “No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Madness rides the star-wind... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial...”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Hound" Written September 1922, published February 1924 in Weird Tales, 3, No. 2, 50–52, 78

• “Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1922 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Herbert West: Re-Animator" in "Home Brew" Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1922)

• “Mystery attracts mystery.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Imprisoned with the Pharaohs" - Written February 1924, published May-June-July 1924 in Weird Tales

• “Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before — the unwhisperable secret of secrets — The fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1925 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: He" - Written August 11, 1925; first published in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 1926)

• “The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Pickman's Model " - written 1926; first published in Weird Tales, Vol. 10, No. 4 (October 1927)

• “One of those creatures wrote you once, ‘do not call up any that you can not put down’.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", written 1927, first published in Weird Tales, July 1941

• “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 have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1928 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Dunwich Horror " - Written Summer 1928; first published in Weird Tales, 13, No. 4, (April 1929)

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

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937), first published in Weird Tales

• “It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self — not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep — the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign...”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Through the Gates of the Silver Key " - written with E. Hoffman Price, October 1932 - April 1933; first published in Weird Tales, Vol. 24, No. 1 (July 1934)

• “Of the pleasures and pains of opium much has been written. The ecstasies and horrors of De Quincey and the paradis artificiels of Baudelaire are preserved and interpreted with an art which makes them immortal, and the world knows well the beauty, the terror and the mystery of those obscure realms into which the inspired dreamer is transported. But much as has been told, no man has yet dared intimate the nature of the phantasms thus unfolded to the mind, or hint at the direction of the unheard-of roads along whose ornate and exotic course the partaker of the drug is so irresistibly borne.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I took opium but once — in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose — my physician was worn out with horror and exertion — and I travelled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I felt that some horrible scene or object lurked beyond the silk-hung walls, and shrank from glancing through the arched, latticed windows that opened so bewilderingly on every hand.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I beheld such a sight as I had never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land — or what was now a narrow point of land — fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am afraid of?”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Barzai knew so much of the gods that he could tell of their comings and goings, and guessed so many of their secrets that he was deemed half a god himself.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods... There is unknown magic on Hatheg-Kla, for the screams of the frightened gods have turned to laughter, and the slopes of ice shoot up endlessly into the black heavens whither I am plunging... Hei! Hei! At last! In the dim light I behold the gods of earth!”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The other gods! The other gods! The gods of the outer hells that guard the feeble gods of earth!... Look away... Go back... Do not see! Do not see! The vengeance of the infinite abysses... That cursed, that damnable pit... Merciful gods of earth, I am falling into the sky!”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Above the mists on Hatheg-Kla, earth's gods sometimes dance reminiscently; for they know they are safe, and love to come from unknown Kadath in ships of clouds and play in the olden way, as they did when earth was new and men not given to the climbing of inaccessible places.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “May the merciful gods, 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. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned frensy into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was — my only friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors which may yet be mine!”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacum beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere. I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream...”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “That was the end of our voluntary searchings in the caverns of dream. Awed, shaken, and portentous, my friend who had been beyond the barrier warned me that we must never venture within those realms again.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from my own, as it was at twenty-five; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica — HYPNOS.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things — in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor....”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “Many of his questions seemed highly out of place to his visitor, especially those which tried to connect the latter with strange cults or societies; and Wilcox could not understand the repeated promises of silence which he was offered in exchange for an admission of membership in some widespread mystical or paganly religious body. When Professor Angell became convinced that the sculptor was indeed ignorant of any cult or system of cryptic lore, he besieged his visitor with demands for future reports of dreams.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “My uncle, it seems, had quickly instituted a prodigiously far-flung body of inquires amongst nearly all the friends whom he could question without impertinence, asking for nightly reports of their dreams, and the dates of any notable visions for some time past. The reception of his request seems to have varied; but he must, at the very least, have received more responses than any ordinary man could have handled without a secretary.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

• “What, in substance, both the Esquimaux wizards and the Louisiana swamp-priests had chanted to their kindred idols was something very like this: the word-divisions being guessed at from traditional breaks in the phrase as chanted aloud: "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn." ... "In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming." .”

  H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

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