Did Lovecraft Quotes & Sayings

The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden. — H.P. Lovecraft

Have only this consolation
that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him. — H.P. Lovecraft

The Silver Key:
I.
In the first days
of his bondage
he had turned
to the gentle churchly
faith endeared to him
by the naive
trust of his fathers,
for thence stretched
mystic avenues
which seemed to promise
escape from life.
II.

Only on closer view
did he mark the starved
fancy and beauty, the
stale and prosy
triteness, and the
owlish gravity
and grotesque
claims of solid truth
which reigned bore somely
and overwhelmingly
among most
of its professors;
or feel
to the full
the awkwardness
with which
it sought to keep
alive as literal
fact the outgrown
fears and guesses
of a primal
race confronting — H.P. Lovecraft

We had allowed ourselves to become distracted on the way to the Crusade, never laid eyes on a Turk, turned to pillage and rapine among the Hungarians and Greeks in order to reach the East ... all for the glory of God, of course, until defeated, — H.P. Lovecraft

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

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

Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects. — H.P. Lovecraft

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, — H.P. Lovecraft

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming ... — H.P. Lovecraft

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

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

And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea. Upon — H.P. Lovecraft

Wells is teaching us to think. Burroughs and his lesser imitators are teaching us not to think. Of course, Burroughs is teaching us to wonder. The sense of wonder is in essence a religious state, blanketing out criticism. Wells was always a critic, even in his most wondrous and romantic tales.

And there, I believe, the two poles of modern fantasy stand defined. At one pole wait Wells and his honorable predecessors such as Swift; at the other, Burroughs and the commercial producers, such as Otis Adelbart Kline, and the weirdies, and horror merchants such as H.P. Lovecraft, and so all the way past Tolkien to today's non-stop fantasy worlders. Mary Shelley stands somewhere at the equator of this metaphor. — Brian W. Aldiss

I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla. — H.P. Lovecraft

Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other. — H.P. Lovecraft

I s'pose you know - though I can see you're a Westerner by your talk - what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with 'em. You've probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there's still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod. — H.P. Lovecraft

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods. Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and languorously under strange stars. — H.P. Lovecraft

This time I did not have to question the source of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankle, unconscious of their effect; for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound - the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats. — H.P. Lovecraft

That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat ... When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls. — H.P. Lovecraft

His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master's vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the 'thirties and 'forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. — H.P. Lovecraft

There are seventeen madhouses in the city of Lovecraft. I've visited all of them. — Caitlin Kittredge

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. — H.P. Lovecraft

That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. — H.P. Lovecraft

Horrors, I believe, should be original - the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

All which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead, — H.P. Lovecraft

Well did the traveler know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colors of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

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

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

It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; — H.P. Lovecraft

The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre. — H.P. Lovecraft

Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate. — H.P. Lovecraft

Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. — H.P. Lovecraft

Carter did not wish to meet a bhole, so — H.P. Lovecraft

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

Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again! — H.P. Lovecraft

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

Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. — H.P. Lovecraft

All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts. — H.P. Lovecraft

I saw it from that hidden, silent place
Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin
At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,
Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
The evening star - but grown a thousandfold
More haunting in this hush and solitude.
It traced strange pictures on the quivering air -
Half-memories that had always filled my eyes -
Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
Of some dim life - I never could tell where.
But I knew that through the cosmic dome
Those rays were calling from my far, lost home. — H.P. Lovecraft

A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within. — H.P. Lovecraft

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.
- Through the Gates of the Silver Key — H.P. Lovecraft

Free of all responsibility or restraint, in the sheer obliviousness of dreams, he had lived like a happy pagan; and now he must go back to the drear existence of a mediaeval monk, beneath the prompting of an obscure sense of duty. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

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

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

There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last
what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn
whatever they had been, they were men! — H.P. Lovecraft

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor. — H.P. Lovecraft

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

I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. — H.P. Lovecraft

Lovecraft story "The Outsider. — Ray Russell

All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large. — H.P. Lovecraft

It isn't so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it's centuries away as the soul goes. — H.P. Lovecraft

As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of the ocean. — H.P. Lovecraft

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,
But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! — H.P. Lovecraft

so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again. — H.P. Lovecraft

Tales of ordinary characters would appeal to a larger class , but I have no wish to make such an appeal . The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me , for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author's perspective . 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 . I could not write about ' ordinary people ' because I am not in the least interested in them . Without interest there can be no art . Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy . It is man's relations to the cosmos - to the unknown - which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination . — H.P. Lovecraft

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination. — H.P. Lovecraft

I read H.P. Lovecraft. I also like Sword and Sorcery stuff, Arthurian legend. — Bruce Boxleitner

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

H.P. Lovecraft is a self-admitted early influence on Ligotti's work. However, in a kind of metaphysical horror story of its own, Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices. (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.) — Jeff VanderMeer

For one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize. — H.P. Lovecraft

Shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch — H.P. Lovecraft

The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops. — H.P. Lovecraft

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing. — H.P. Lovecraft

Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? — H.P. Lovecraft

Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point. — H.P. Lovecraft