H. P. LOVECRAFT QUOTES II
American author (1890-1937)
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises ...
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
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
"The Tomb"
There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
I couldn't live a week without a private library -- indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Selected Letters
Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
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
"The Crawling Chaos"
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
Selected Letters
Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of 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
letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4, 1930
Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Colour Out of Space"
The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Colour Out of Space"
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
"The Call of Cthulhu"
Zoologists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50 -- but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to E. Hoffmann Price, July 29, 1936
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Selected Letters
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
letter to J. Vernon Shea, August 7, 1931
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Dagon"
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
"Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His Family"
The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
unpublished letter to the Providence Journal, April 13, 1934
I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nemesis"