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H. P. Lovecraft

154 quotes

“No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet:”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The dream-narratives and cuttings collected by the professor were, of course, strong corroboration; but the rationalism of my mind and the extravagance of the whole subject led me to adopt what I thought the most sensible conclusions. So, after thoroughly studying the manuscript again and correlating the theosophical and anthropological notes with the cult narrative of Legrasse, I made a trip to Providence to see the sculptor and give him the rebuke I thought proper for so boldly imposing upon a learned and aged man.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as l wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought with a shudder of what Old Castro had told Legrasse about the Old Ones; "They had come from the stars, and had brought Their images with Them.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity. Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But I do not think my life will be long. As my uncle went, as poor Johansen went, so I shall go. I know too much, and the cult still lives.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving....”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible — though I know not in what proportion — still remains.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and sanity!”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[...] we left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sculptured images of these Shoggoths filled Danforth and me with horror and loathing. They were normally shapeless entities composed of a viscous jelly which looked like an agglutination of bubbles, and each averaged about fifteen feet in diameter when a sphere. They had, however, a constantly shifting shape and volume—throwing out temporary developments or forming apparent organs of sight, hearing, and speech in imitation of their masters, either spontaneously or according to suggestion.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[...] there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing, and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1915 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Allowable Rhyme (1915)
“We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: At the Root (1918)
“It is good to be a cynic—it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world—we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death—the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1921 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Nietzscheism and Realism" from The Rainbow, Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1921); reprinted in "To Quebec and the Stars", and also in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 71
“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927)
“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.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1927 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927)
“We must stop thinking primarily in terms of “money” and “business” - both artificial things—and begin to think increasingly in terms of the actual resources and products on which “money” and “business” are based. In terms of these, of the human beings to whom they are to be distributed, and of the cognate human values which make the accidents of life and consciousness worth enduring.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1933 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Some Repetitions on the Times", (1933). Reprinted in Miscellaneous Writings, edited by S.T. Joshi. Arkham House, 1995.
“I am Providence.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Epitaph on his headstone, which he used in letters to Lillian D. Clark (March 1926) and James F. Morton (May 1926) around the time of his April 1926 return to Providence after living for two years in New York City. Orig…
Also quoted by: Howard Phillips Lovecraft (it)
“I am only about half alive—a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However—so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1918 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Alfred Galpin (27 May 1918), published in Letters to Alfred Galpin edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 18
“I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups—(a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (7 March 1920), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 110
“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.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1924 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird printed in Weird Tales 3, no. 3 (March 1924), pp. 89-92. Quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 122
“good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 487
“There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to J. Vernon Shea (August 7, 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
“All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Robert E. Howard (August 16, 1932), in Selected Letters 1932-1934 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 57
“It is well to avoid actually recognized myths such as vampirism, reincarnation, etc., and invent one’s own obscure violations of cosmic law. What common myth, for example, does Blackwood use in The Willows? Or Chambers in "The Yellow Sign"? Or Hodgson in The House on the Borderland? These writers create a sort of distinctive awe of their own and manage to say something fresh despite all that has been said before.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1934 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Duane Rimel (September 28, 1935), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 198
“[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system . . . a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to C.L. Moore (c. mid-October 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 566
“I can look back . . . at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust—a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to August Derleth (1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 307
“It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur"—although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony—or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do—though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to August Derleth (May 16, 1931), responding to Derleth's suggestion that he call the interconnected mythology of his stories (what would later be known as the Cthulhu Mythos) "The Mythology of Hastur", quoted in…
“I am Providence, and Providence is myself—together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1926 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to James F. Morton (May 16, 1926), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 192
“It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1929 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to James F. Morton (November 6, 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 208
“What do we know ... of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From Beyond" Written November 16, 1920, published June 1934 in The Fantasy Fan, 1
“In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1917 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Tomb" - Written June 1917; first published in The Vagrant, No. 14 (March 1922)
“There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Celephaïs" - Written early November 1920; first published in The Rainbow, No. 2 (May 1922)
“There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret. No sooner had I crawled beneath the overhanging foliage of the palm, than there dropped from its branches a young child of such beauty as I never beheld before. Though ragged and dusty, this being bore the features of a faun or demigod, and seemed almost to diffuse a radiance in the dense shadow of the tree. It smiled and extended its hand, but before I could arise and speak I heard in the upper air the exquisite melody of singing; notes high and low blent with a sublime and ethereal harmoniousness. The sun had by this time sunk below the horizon, and in the twilight I saw an aureole of lambent light encircled the child's head. Then in a tone of silver it addressed me: "It is the end. They have come down through the gloaming from the stars. Now all is over, and beyond the Arinurian streams we shall dwell blissfully in Teloe." As the child spoke, I beheld a soft radiance through the leaves of the palm tree, and rising, greeted a pair whom I knew to be the chief singers among those I had heard. A god and goddess they must have been, for such beauty is not mortal; and they took my hands, saying, "Come, child, you have heard the voices, and all is well....”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ocean ate the last of the land and poured into the smoking gulf, thereby giving up all it had ever conquered. From the new-flooded lands it flowed again, uncovering death and decay; and from its ancient and immemorial bed it trickled loathsomely, uncovering nighted secrets of the years when Time was young and the gods unborn. Above the waves rose weedy remembered spires. The moon laid pale lilies of light on dead London, and Paris stood up from its damp grave to be sanctified with star-dust. Then rose spires and monoliths that were weedy but not remembered; terrible spires and monoliths of lands that men never knew were lands...”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer not man to tell that he hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remains. When they left their old peaks they took with them all signs of themselves, save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called Ngranek. ... They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men to come; or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste; else they would seek injudiciously to scale it.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain forms of sleep — those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men, and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect....”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments — inarticulateness. What I learned and saw in those hours of impious exploration can never be told — for want of symbols or suggestions in any language. I say this because from first to last our discoveries partook only of the nature of sensations; sensations correlated with no impression which the nervous system of normal humanity is capable of receiving. They were sensations, yet within them lay unbelievable elements of time and space — things which at bottom possess no distinct and definite existence. Human utterance can best convey the general character of our experiences by calling them plungings or soarings...”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them. These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. 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. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die...”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The brave Norwegian drove his vessel head on against the pursuing jelly which rose above the unclean froth like the stern of a daemon galleon. The awful squid-head with writhing feelers came nearly up to the bowsprit of the sturdy yacht, but Johansen drove on relentlessly. There was a bursting as of an exploding bladder, a slushy nastiness as of a cloven sunfish, a stench as of a thousand opened graves, and a sound that the chronicler could not put on paper. For an instant the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern; where — God in heaven! — the scattered plasticity of that nameless sky-spawn was nebulously recombining in its hateful original form...”
H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) said by 1937 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source