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af5a5d0
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That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat....When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rat..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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d46db28
|
For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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3e6e510
|
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
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pickman-s-model
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ae35ad7
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For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4b12282
|
When you can hear a spider walk across the floor, you know it's time to keep your socks on. Thank God for insecticide.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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0e99b92
|
The Silver Key: I. In the first days of his bondage he had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the naive trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic avenues which seemed to promise escape from life. II. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned bore somely and overwhelmingly among most of its p..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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8bebb0a
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I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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995943f
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Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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9ea7fab
|
Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory. It is as if our inward selves, released from the bonds of daytime and objectivity, revelled in prisoned emotions which are hastily stifled when we translate them. In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them res..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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1536717
|
for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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0f101b5
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They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ba624fa
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God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad,
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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6e2762a
|
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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16126b0
|
To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us o..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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d79836d
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And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats - the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion - the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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abc9a8d
|
The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops.
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cats-vs-dogs
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f47fc55
|
The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
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inspirational
partying
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4bab3a7
|
We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spear others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4eb0adf
|
There are so many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and proasic with the poison of life.
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imagination
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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43918c8
|
And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities. After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vi..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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bbfc627
|
Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops; but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant drowsy herbs.
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lovecraft
|
H.P. Lovecraft |
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1ddcab0
|
The Lurking Fear: Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from undergr..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4e4c069
|
En epocas extranas hasta la muerte puede morir.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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a304bd8
|
By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers..
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fantasy
lovecraft
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f2be045
|
Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the marvelous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then in..
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dream
fantasy
lovecraft
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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b95931e
|
What we did see--for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned--was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that should not be";"
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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6f70c4e
|
I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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5e71cd3
|
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 frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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c498614
|
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me--to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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5d92506
|
I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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706feee
|
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.
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confusion
roads
regrets
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f8ee60c
|
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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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13df61b
|
There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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552949e
|
Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.
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warning
legendary
epic
monster
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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25925b8
|
At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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a1ebb0e
|
All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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633fa6b
|
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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979ae66
|
It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx ..
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cats-and-other-myths
|
H.P. Lovecraft |
|
5a31033
|
A horrible coma call'd living So now in this coma call'd living
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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69dec07
|
Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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e557d94
|
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"."
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ae04212
|
Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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d051a43
|
I saw it from that hidden, silent place Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in. It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin At first, but with a slowly brightening face. Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued, Beat on my sight as never it did of old; The evening star - but grown a thousandfold More haunting in this hush and solitude. It traced strange pictures on the quivering air - Half-memories that had always filled my e..
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poetry
lovecraft
star
|
H.P. Lovecraft |
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40d37bf
|
Wave after wave of cats poured down from the hill as if a vent into a world of cats had been opened,
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H.P. Lovecraft |