Quotes from H.P. Lovecraft

forests of monsterous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannible devils; mound like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion...insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies.

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.

I made it last night in a dream of strange cities;

When you can hear a spider walk across the floor, you know it's time to keep your socks on. Thank God for insecticide.

Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that 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. Custom had dinned into his ears

A horrible coma call'd living So now in this coma call'd living I view the bright phantoms of beauty; The false hollow phantoms of beauty

He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: "Cthulhu fhtagn", "Cthulhu fhtagn".

There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany pieces' —but alas— where are any Lovecraft pieces?

Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.

There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through.

The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.

I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road.

Wave after wave of cats poured down from the hill as if a vent into a world of cats had been opened

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.

all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead

life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. 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.

There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, grass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness...

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable;

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.

All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.

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

It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones.

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.