H. P. LOVECRAFT QUOTES IV

American author (1890-1937)

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

"The Rats in the Walls"

Tags: cats


Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals -- for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

letter to James F. Morton, February 10, 1923


One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird, Weird Tales, March 1924


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

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep"


The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Supernatural Horror in Literature"


As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Nietzscheism and Realism"


Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Supernatural Horror in Literature"

Tags: danger


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

letter to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright accompanying his submission of "The Call of Cthulhu", summer 1927

Tags: humanity


The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Dunwich Horror"


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

"The Thing on the Doorstep"

Tags: evil


Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Call of Cthulhu"


Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Dreams in the Witch House"


Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is--both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology--of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

letter to James F. Morton, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life

Tags: pessimism


Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Allowable Rhyme"


It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self -- not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep -- the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"Through the Gates of the Silver Key"


Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries--or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me--in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916


We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"At the Root"

Tags: men


It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.

H. P. LOVECRAFT

"The Call of Cthulhu"

Tags: monsters


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

letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 16, 1915

Tags: religion


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

"Supernatural Horror in Literature"