American author (1890-1937)
My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Transition of Juan Romero"
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"
Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror--indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929
In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
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
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
My conception of phantasy, as a genuine art-form, is an extension rather than a negation of reality. Ordinary tales about a castle ghost or old-fashioned werewolf are merely so much junk. The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, and consciousness. This curiosity and sense of awe, I believe, are quite basic among the sensitive minority in question; and I see no reason to think that they will decline in the future--for as you point out, the frontier of the unknown can never do more than scratch the surface of eternally unknowable infinity.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 17, 1930
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Selected Letters
I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups--(a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logic. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, March 7, 1920
If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me ...
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Frank Belknap, February 27, 1931
Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"