Top 100 H P Lovecraft Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About H P Lovecraft

#1. Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.

Ellen Datlow

#2. 'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.

Victor LaValle

#3. I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.

Stephen King

#4. I tend to look way back for my inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe.

Drew Daywalt

#5. I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood.

Richard Matheson

#6. If H. P. Lovecraft and H. L. Mencken had ever collaborated, they might have come up with something like The Edge of Reason. This one will delight thinkers-and outrage true believers-of all stripes.

George R R Martin

#7. H.P. Lovecraft is for the summer between junior and senior years in high school. Cosmic fear hits you about then anyway
you realize you'll soon have to Get a Real Job or Go To College or Both and in those days, Be Drafted. A dose of Cthulhu helps put these feelings in perspective.

Howard Waldrop

#8. H.P. Lovecraft is for fantasy fiction what C.G. Jung is for analytical psychology.

Bogdan Vaida

#9. Everyone is so desensitised that the potency of artfully deployed italics has long been lost. It was good enough for H. P. Lovecraft, but apparently it isn't good enough for the modern world, filled as it is with obtuse bastards.

Jonathan L. Howard

#10. I really like dating stories, like in Betty and Veronica comics; I like David Lynch and H.P. Lovecraft for the dark gut-wrenching stuff, and I'm inspired by Miyazaki's films for the subtle heart-warming moments, as well as the moments that blew up my imagination.

Fred Seibert

#11. I read H.P. Lovecraft. I also like Sword and Sorcery stuff, Arthurian legend.

Bruce Boxleitner

#12. Whether it was H. P. Lovecraft's doomed towns or Shirley Jackson's lonely, looming 'The Haunting of Hill House,' the boondocks had all the fun. As a black kid in Queens, New York, I couldn't have felt more removed.

Victor LaValle

#13. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#15. Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

H.P. Lovecraft

#16. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#18. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#20. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience
but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.

H.P. Lovecraft

#21. Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches ... men should not have the heads of crocodiles ...

H.P. Lovecraft

#22. I don't believe that there is any fourth dimension, and I emphatically do not believe in Tao.

H.P. Lovecraft

#23. 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

#24. It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.

H.P. Lovecraft

#25. It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.

H.P. Lovecraft

#26. incurable lover of the grotesque

H.P. Lovecraft

#27. better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a bhole, which one cannot see.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#29. With hidden powers of unknown extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town.

H.P. Lovecraft

#30. Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold.

H.P. Lovecraft

#31. For one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize.

H.P. Lovecraft

#32. These little debates are known as "flamewars.

H.P. Lovecraft

#33. Looking desultorily about, his attention had been drawn by a dull glimmering on one of the tables; and he had extricated the queer orblike stone from its shadowy, crowded position between an ugly little Aztec idol, the fossil egg of a dinornis, and an obscene fetish of black wood from the Niger.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#37. Nothing is so intimately a part of a man as his library. It contains just what the possessor wants to look at most often, and comes to form his window or gateway to the larger cosmos.

H.P. Lovecraft

#38. 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

#39. It had been so long abandoned that the rats scurrying on their errands spared me no more than occasional glances of annoyance.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#41. Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

H.P. Lovecraft

#42. I could not help feeling that they were evil things
mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.

H.P. Lovecraft

#43. No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.

H.P. Lovecraft

#44. 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

#45. 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

H.P. Lovecraft

#46. 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

#47. Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.

H.P. Lovecraft

#48. For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

H.P. Lovecraft

#49. All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#51. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon - but of these things I must not now speak.

H.P. Lovecraft

#52. Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law.

H.P. Lovecraft

#53. There was something very fishy about Riley Bay.

Serra Elinsen

#54. At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb.

H.P. Lovecraft

#55. The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.

H.P. Lovecraft

#56. 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

#57. 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.

H.P. Lovecraft

#58. The cat ... is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#60. The geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal,

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#62. To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form - and local human passions and conditions and standards - are depicted as native to other worlds and universes.

H.P. Lovecraft

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

H.P. Lovecraft

#66. That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#68. 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

#69. 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

H.P. Lovecraft

#70. The priest was dead. Nevertheless, he sat at table with us as we feasted on cold meats.

H.P. Lovecraft

#71. They were large, even for the mus decumanus, which sometimes measures fifteen inches in length,

H.P. Lovecraft

#72. If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

H.P. Lovecraft

#73. An' when they git ready ... I say, when they git ... ever hear tell of a shoggoth? 'Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be - I seen 'em one mght when ... eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh ...

H.P. Lovecraft

#74. It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.

H.P. Lovecraft

#75. Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#77. 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

#78. Never Explain Anything

H.P. Lovecraft

#79. When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect - designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.

H.P. Lovecraft

#80. God!...If only I had not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror!

H.P. Lovecraft

#81. 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

#82. The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic - nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#84. 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.

H.P. Lovecraft

#85. Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane.

H.P. Lovecraft

#86. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind - of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

H.P. Lovecraft

#87. Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake.

H.P. Lovecraft

#88. The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see.

H.P. Lovecraft

#89. Adulthood is hell.

H.P. Lovecraft

#90. 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

#91. The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky. When

H.P. Lovecraft

#92. Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms.

H.P. Lovecraft

#93. Who knows the end? What

H.P. Lovecraft

#94. All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept.

H.P. Lovecraft

#95. All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember. The

H.P. Lovecraft