Quotes from H.P. Lovecraft

I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places.

There is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.

They said it had been there before D'Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods.

Sometimes, I believe that this less material life [of dreams] is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty's Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.

It is not unusual for the central menace of a work of horror fiction to be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.

Who knows the end? What

The scene I cannot describe--I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows.

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

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.

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.

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

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

he climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed bhole

As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.

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

By the Ram with a Thousand Ewes! By the Tail of Dagon and the Horns of Derceto!" said Azédarac, as he fingered the tiny, pot-bellied vial of vermilion liquid on the table before him. "Something will have to be done with this pestilential Brother Ambrose.

Ihre Hand ist an eurer Kehle, doch seht ihr Sie nicht.

this very morning, an hour agone, he has mounted his white ass for the return journey to Vyones.

la satisfacción de un momento es la ruina del siguiente.

He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.

So talked a while with Sarr about his cats—the usual subject of conversation, especially because, now that summer's coming, they're bringing in dead things every night. Field mice, moles, shrews, birds, even a little garter snake. They don't eat them, just lay them out on the porch for the Poroths to see—sort of an offering, I guess.

Es wäre ihnen ein Leichtes, die Erde zu erobern, sie haben es aber bislang nicht versucht, weil dazu keine Notwendigkeit bestand. Sie lassen die Dinge lieber so, wie sie sind, und ersparen sich die Scherereien.