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4816bfd
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The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f03fa39
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From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
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irony
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f73daac
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It is good to be a cynic -- it is better to be a contented cat -- and it is best not to exist at all.
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suicide
existence
cynic
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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21415a7
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I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
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lovecraft
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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656f9e3
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If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
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madness
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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a61f7fe
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Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
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h-p-lovecraft
weird
horror
evil
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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556d500
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We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or ..
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emotion
truth
brainwashing
cheat
falsity
orthodox
religionists
bias
indoctrination
conformity
value
evidence
atheism
atheist
honor
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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8f35981
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Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
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memory
psychology
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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6b8e20e
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In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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55cbb77
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The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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d5fb581
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For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...
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dreams
thinking
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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113264e
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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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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933d226
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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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ccc4d0a
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I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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e460c0a
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The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.
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horror
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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fe4d831
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I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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a160a8c
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Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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2080ce1
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I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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789d562
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That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.
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macabre
fear
horror
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ed8873c
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The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. 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. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our fr..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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7138344
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I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.
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sci-fi
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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83fe9de
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There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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fa94159
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When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.
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macabre
old-ones
lovecraft
h-p-lovecraft
horror
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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96dc9db
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The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
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lovecraft
horror
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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113ad4e
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For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
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outsider
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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9a0f6cb
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It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ffdb8f0
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The one test of the really weird (story) 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.
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writing
weird-tales
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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212ddfe
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With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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24486c4
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I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
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poetry
life
knowledge
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ef8031f
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No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. -
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death
identity
identity-crisis
doom
despair
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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a7f893a
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Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
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futility
meaning
interpretation-of-dreams
senselessness
interpretation
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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206171f
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The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. 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..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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614156b
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Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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c7806d3
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It was just a colour out of space--a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.
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science-fiction
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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8e216b6
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But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more d..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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0e16360
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So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall through I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without eve..
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solitude
light
tower
forest
sky
waiting
longing
unknown
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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0610604
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There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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e859c40
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I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
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humor
horror
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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95c4c9d
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A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a..
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fantasy
weird
fantastic
horror
supernatural
|
H.P. Lovecraft |
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a977a99
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Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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99a52f2
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We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
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fiction-fantasy
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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809ee5c
|
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loossed upon the world.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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c3092f1
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Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that 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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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620f7e5
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And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
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H.P. Lovecraft |