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42b090f
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And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirl..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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e0296ea
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That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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867e89b
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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
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4eb35ff
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It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. 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
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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7262258
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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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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fe2cf48
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It is absurd to say that mathematicians have not discovered the fourth dimension.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f48d22b
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for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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773ee7e
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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...
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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422db31
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Non e morto cio che puo vivere in eterno, E in strani eoni anche la morte puo morire.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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132b562
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Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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78193b1
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I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best--one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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0c48bdb
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Where does madness leave off and reality begin?
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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2c556e6
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In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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1f89e69
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Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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42e236b
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I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4e01960
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Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding something--some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere or apparent sphere of some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even tho..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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a868b8c
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Common sense" in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility." --
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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8794d9f
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I have often wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences--Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism--there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ff32ec8
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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.
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madness
past
undoing
study
mystery
obsession
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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5bb0333
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Though at times interested in reforms, notably prohibition (I have never tasted alcoholic liquor), I was inclined to be bored by ethical casuistry; since I believed conduct to be a matter of taste and breeding, with virtue, delicacy, and truthfulness as symbols of gentility. Of my word and honour I was inordinately proud, and would permit no reflections to be cast upon them. I thought ethics too obvious and commonplace to be scientifically ..
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sobriety
prohibition
liquor
pagan
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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b7f553a
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Even yet I do not know why the ocean holds such a fascination for me. But then, perhaps none of us can solve those things--they exist in defiance of all explanation. There are men, and wise men, who do not like the sea and its lapping surf on yellow shores; and they think us strange who love the mystery of the ancient and unending deep. Yet for me there is a haunting and inscrutable glamour in all the ocean's moods. It is in the melancholy ..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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5533e2d
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When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods. Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed e..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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fa092bc
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The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f5087c3
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A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light a..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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024f860
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And even in the open air the stench of whiskey was appalling. To this fiendish poison, I am certain, the greater part of the squalor I saw is due. Many of these vermin were obviously not foreigners--I counted at least five American countenances in which a certain vanished decency half showed through the red whiskey bloating. Then I reflected upon the power of wine, and marveled how self-respecting persons can imbibe such stuff, or permit it..
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sobriety
drinking
ale
booze
straight-edge
teetotal
teetotaler
lovecraft
beer
drunkeness
drunk
poison
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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dc576fa
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Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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dcb0c24
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When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring's flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there wa..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4fdf1e1
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He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and connetions--their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to re..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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6faa5aa
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I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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c956c50
|
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?" --
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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ed6f7d8
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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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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8acf03c
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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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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5fa8fd9
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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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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b32422b
|
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
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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c525701
|
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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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3946d62
|
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.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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3f22868
|
I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies w..
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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f86ff22
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that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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0780bb3
|
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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93f821b
|
Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or "outsideness" without laying stress on the emotion of fear."
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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06dd81a
|
There will always be a small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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7895bba
|
The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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4fb0cd2
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There is in certain ancient things a trace Of some dim essence -- More than form or weight; A tenuous aether, indeterminate, Yet linked with all the laws of time and space. A faint, veiled sign of continuities That outward eyes can never quite descry;
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universe
reality
truth
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H.P. Lovecraft |
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8de617b
|
Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing--too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.
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H.P. Lovecraft |