Lovecraft's Quotes

#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. This is Lovecraft's best terrible story. It is so artificial...and so overblown...and so ludicrous...that it slithers-through tiramisu-rich prose that might as well be heavy metal lyrics ("a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning")-all the way to the summit of high camp.

Kenneth Hite

#4. 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

#5. On the other hand, there is also the matter of Lovecraft's place in popular culture.

Ross E. Lockhart

#6. Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth's globe.

H.P. Lovecraft

#7. Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training, it can be elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit.

H.P. Lovecraft

#8. We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded pretty, and that's all we know and all we need to know!

H.P. Lovecraft

#9. Heaven knows where I'll end up - but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.

H.P. Lovecraft

#10. I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.

H.P. Lovecraft

#11. My youngest boy went mad. He sits drooling on the porch, trying to play the cat like an accordion. He's been scratched some.

H.P. Lovecraft

#12. If there's one thing Robert had learned in three weeks at Lovecraft Middle School, it's that nothing was impossible.

Charles Gilman

#13. 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

#14. I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know
or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.

H.P. Lovecraft

#15. What we did see - for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned - was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be";

H.P. Lovecraft

#16. Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#18. Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

H.P. Lovecraft

#19. Think not that delight and understanding dwell just across the Karthian hills, or in any spot thou canst find in a day's, or a year's, or a lustrum's journey.

H.P. Lovecraft

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe.

H.P. Lovecraft

#23. ...great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#25. The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it'll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean."
"Who's-"
"Because you're gay.

David Wong

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#28. 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

#29. It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And,

H.P. Lovecraft

#30. It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth's centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.

H.P. Lovecraft

#31. 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

#32. Rude cross lay flat upon the barren earth and on it was bound a man - half-naked, wild of aspect with his corded limbs, glaring eyes and shock of tangled hair. His executioners were Roman soldiers, and with heavy hammers they prepared to pin the victim's hands and feet to the wood with iron spikes.

H.P. Lovecraft

#33. Whitman Press will publish three children's textbooks, based on your creed, for which you'll deliver manuscripts and artwork. The three books are: 1. Dagon and Jill 2. The Shadow Over Humpty Dumpty 3. A Children's Necronomicon (with pop-up section)

H.P. Lovecraft

#34. There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.

H.P. Lovecraft

#35. It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the soul goes.

H.P. Lovecraft

#36. In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray's Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.

H.P. Lovecraft

#37. having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home

H.P. Lovecraft

#38. 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.

H.P. Lovecraft

#39. Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people.

H.P. Lovecraft

#40. I forget all about how good-looking she was at a distance because, close up? My balls pretty much sucked up into my body." "I like your friend, Dan," said Lovecraft. "He's graphic.

Jonathan L. Howard

#41. We should perceive that man's period of historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to allow of any considerable mental change.

H.P. Lovecraft

#42. Well, yeah, you listen to a talking snake and there's gonna be trouble.

Mike Mignola

#43. Garris had pet names for all of them. Mahler was the Mad Doktor. Franz Liszt was Son of Lovecraft. Mendelssohn was Santa Claus Meets the Hell's Angels. Beethoven was the High School Principal.

Chet Williamson

#44. Still, it's a nice, cynical book for those who like atrocity scenes - starving prisoners forced to eat their girlfriends, etc.

H.P. Lovecraft

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. We call ourselves a dog's 'master' - but who ever dared to call himself the 'master' of a cat? We own a dog - he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat - he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there.

H.P. Lovecraft

#48. Was tempted to quote Walden - "Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?" - but refrained. How can I get lonely, I asked, when there's still so much to read?

H.P. Lovecraft

#49. Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.

H.P. Lovecraft

#50. The Weaver is a really godlike power. It's not even a blind idiot god, a sort of Lovecraft thing, it's just a purely capricious god. It's an intelligence you can't understand, so you can't trust it."

China Mieville

#51. 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

#52. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#55. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#58. 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

#59. [...] Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]

Charles Stross

#60. 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

#61. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#63. incurable lover of the grotesque

H.P. Lovecraft

#64. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#66. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#69. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#71. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#73. 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

#74. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. A little north of Boston, there was something called LOVECRAFT KEYHOLE; it was a crater in the rough shape of a padlock.

Joe Hill

#80. 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

#81. 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

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

Serra Elinsen

#83. 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

#84. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#87. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#93. 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

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

H.P. Lovecraft

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

H.P. Lovecraft

#96. Fayez whistled low. That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y'know, whatever.

James S.A. Corey

#97. 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

#98. 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

#99. 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

#100. 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