Quotes from H.P. Lovecraft

Rara vez deja de haber ironía incluso en el mayor de los horrores.

The strange things of the past which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness. But

Was tempted to quote Walden—"Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?"—but refrained. How can I get lonely, I asked, when there's still so much to read?

Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet's long and largely unknown career.

What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.

I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever.

It is absurd to say that mathematicians have not discovered the fourth dimension.

Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches...men should not have the heads of crocodiles...

There was a formula—a sort of list of things to say and do—which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe's guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb.

Sheehan's Pool Room, which adorns one of the lesser alleys in the heart of Chicago's stockyard district, is not a nice place. Its air, freighted with a thousand odours such as Coleridge may have found at Cologne, too seldom knows the purifying rays of the sun; but fights for space with the acrid fumes of unnumbered cheap cigars and cigarettes which dangle from the coarse lips of unnumbered human animals that haunt the place day and night.

Could it be that the dream-soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dulness could not utter?

This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates.

an' when they git ready... I say, when they git... ever hear tell of a shoggoth? 'Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be - I seen 'em one mght when... eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh...

Scrivo in uno stato di tensione insostenibile. Fra poco sarà l'alba e, allora, io non esisterò più. Privo d'ogni mezzo, privo della droga che — sola — mi ha consentito fino ad oggi di sopravvivere ai miei incubi, non mi rimane altro modo per sottrarmi al tormento: mi getterò dall'alta finestra di questa soffitta, nella squallida strada sottostante.

scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy.

If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last - even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.

Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.

For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills—and that those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men.

Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.

Chronophagos, the Devourer of Time, the Eater of Hours. What man remembereth even the hour of his death if the Chronophagos hath devoured it? —Nicephoros Attaliades, The Testament of Nightmares

several of our company told of ghosts, one, how a man had been slain on the way to the wars, but had not known it, his ghost going on, thinking himself alive, performing deeds of great valor, even returning home in triumph where he bought lands, begot sons, and lived in contentment for many years before discovering one day, by chance, that he was already dead.

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.

Que no está muerto lo que yace eternamente  y con el paso de los evos, aun la muerte puede morir»

the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass.