Top 100 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes
#1. I don't believe that there is any fourth dimension, and I emphatically do not believe in Tao.
H.P. Lovecraft
#2. There are so 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 proasic with the poison of life.
H.P. Lovecraft
#3. It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
H.P. Lovecraft
#5. My eldest cat, "Nigger-Man," was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts;
H.P. Lovecraft
#6. I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.
H.P. Lovecraft
#8. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
H.P. Lovecraft
#9. This man bore no resemblance to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more urban person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache.
H.P. Lovecraft
#10. Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.
H.P. Lovecraft
#11. From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?
H.P. Lovecraft
#12. 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.
H.P. Lovecraft
#13. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears
H.P. Lovecraft
#14. No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
H.P. Lovecraft
#15. We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
H.P. Lovecraft
#16. I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake
whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.
H.P. Lovecraft
#18. I think drink is ugly, and therefore I have nothing to do with it.
H.P. Lovecraft
#20. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it
and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.
H.P. Lovecraft
#21. As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
H.P. Lovecraft
#22. the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice - and I don't say I'm blaming those that hold it.
H.P. Lovecraft
#23. But did it ever occur to you, my friend, that force and matter are merely the barriers to perception imposed by time and space?
H.P. Lovecraft
#24. No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.
H.P. Lovecraft
#25. For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills - and that those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men.
H.P. Lovecraft
#26. he climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed bhole
H.P. Lovecraft
#27. I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge.
H.P. Lovecraft
#28. In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming
H.P. Lovecraft
#29. Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises ...
H.P. Lovecraft
#30. 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.
H.P. Lovecraft
#31. I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost.
H.P. Lovecraft
#32. On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.
H.P. Lovecraft
#33. We shall dive down through black abysses ... and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.
H.P. Lovecraft
#34. Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.
H.P. Lovecraft
#35. All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
H.P. Lovecraft
#36. 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
#37. I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.
H.P. Lovecraft
#38. It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind.
H.P. Lovecraft
#39. I am well-nigh resolv'd to write no more tales but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick.
H.P. Lovecraft
#40. The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous.
H.P. Lovecraft
#41. Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic
the abnormally chromatic entity in "The Colour Out of Space" being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.
H.P. Lovecraft
#42. There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought tp stand prepared for any sort of action at any time.
H.P. Lovecraft
#43. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
H.P. Lovecraft
#44. He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.
H.P. Lovecraft
#45. Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
H.P. Lovecraft
#46. 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
#47. Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story.
H.P. Lovecraft
#48. I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living.
H.P. Lovecraft
#49. From my experience, I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking.
H.P. Lovecraft
#50. In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown.
H.P. Lovecraft
#51. At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.
H.P. Lovecraft
#52. Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.
H.P. Lovecraft
#53. Despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dreams
H.P. Lovecraft
#54. Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey; for silence continued to answer all calls despatched to the camp.
H.P. Lovecraft
#55. I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
H.P. Lovecraft
#56. I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism - religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
H.P. Lovecraft
#57. A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs.
H.P. Lovecraft
#58. 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
#59. The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.
H.P. Lovecraft
#60. 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!
H.P. Lovecraft
#61. One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.
H.P. Lovecraft
#64. Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.
H.P. Lovecraft
#65. Orthodox Christianity, by playing upon the emotions of man, is able to accomplish wonders toward keeping him in order and relieving his mind. It can frighten or cajole him away from evil more effectively than could reason.
H.P. Lovecraft
#66. 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.
H.P. Lovecraft
#67. 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
#68. I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
H.P. Lovecraft
#69. The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.
H.P. Lovecraft
#70. It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.
H.P. Lovecraft
#71. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
H.P. Lovecraft
#72. Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other's houses, and the burying ground, and the sea?
H.P. Lovecraft
#73. There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, grass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness ...
H.P. Lovecraft
#74. He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit
H.P. Lovecraft
#75. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!
H.P. Lovecraft
#76. Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!
H.P. Lovecraft
#79. For the purpose of securing epithets at once accurate and felicitous, the young author should familiarize himself thoroughly with the general aspect and phenomena of Nature, as well as with the ideas and associations which these things produce in the human mind.
H.P. Lovecraft
#80. Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.
H.P. Lovecraft
#81. Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.
H.P. Lovecraft
#82. Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.
H.P. Lovecraft
#83. I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.
H.P. Lovecraft
#84. I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.
H.P. Lovecraft
#85. nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space - their
H.P. Lovecraft
#86. my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths.
H.P. Lovecraft
#87. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He
H.P. Lovecraft
#88. And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation.
H.P. Lovecraft
#89. Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word "eldritch" so many times now that I think about it ...
H.P. Lovecraft
#90. Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
H.P. Lovecraft
#91. Democracy is just a false idol - a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations.
H.P. Lovecraft
#92. A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.
H.P. Lovecraft
#93. We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn't much.
H.P. Lovecraft
#94. That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
H.P. Lovecraft
#95. The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
H.P. Lovecraft
#96. Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design.
H.P. Lovecraft
#97. Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder, I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.
H.P. Lovecraft
#98. The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor.
H.P. Lovecraft
#99. In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.
H.P. Lovecraft
#100. I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality.
H.P. Lovecraft
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