H. P. Lovecraft Quotes - Page 9

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• It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Night, Profound, Imagination

  H. P. Lovecraft (2010). “Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft”, p.145, Lulu.com

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• Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Ideas, Giving, Tolerance

  H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, James Turner (1976). “Selected Letters 1934-1937”, Arkham House Publishers

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• No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Real, Emotional, Order

  H. P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, James Turner (1976). “Selected Letters 1934-1937”, Arkham House Publishers

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• My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Art, Writing, Sight

  H.P. Lovecraft, Digital Papyrus (2014). “H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection (160 Works Including Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborations, Poetry, Essays & Bonus Audiobook Links)”, p.1753, eBookIt.com

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• It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Thinking, Ideas, Doe

  Letter to August Derleth (16 May 1931), in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 505), 1996.

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• Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Advantage, Perceive, Vague

  Letter to Maurice W. Moe (16 January 1915), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 10), 1965.

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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.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Evil, Feelings, Mountain

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ Ultimate Collection: 120+ Works ALL in One Volume: Complete Novellas & Short Stories, Juvenilia, Poetry, Essays & Collaborations: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Dunwich Horror, Dagon, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Outsider, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Cats of Ultharäó_”, p.844, e-artnow

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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!

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Doors, Hands, Body

  H. P. Lovecraft (2007). “The Whisperer in Darkness”, p.7, Wordsworth Editions

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• Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Stars, Fall, Hero

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• An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Mean, Writing, Reality

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• It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now - but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Memories, Real

  Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in "Selected Letters V, 1934-1937" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (pp. 416-417), 1976.

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• The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect successions of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Often Is, Long, Perfect

  H.P. Lovecraft, Digital Papyrus (2014). “H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection (160 Works Including Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborations, Poetry, Essays & Bonus Audiobook Links)”, p.1651, eBookIt.com

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• It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Men, Laughing, Universe

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• So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  World, Pope, Concerned

  H.P. Lovecraft (2016). “The Complete H.P. Lovecraft Collection”, p.1820, Xist Publishing

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• All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Atheist, Thinking, Hair

  H. P. Lovecraft (1999). “The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories”, p.11, Penguin

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• With hidden powers of unknown extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Men, Towns

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• After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space -- to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Men, Vegetables, Civilization

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Illustrated)”, p.1404, Delphi Classics

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• I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Gentleman, Doe, Coats

  H. P. Lovecraft (2010). “Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft”, p.104, Lulu.com

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• The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  School, Artist, Mad

  "The Allowable Rhyme". Book by H. P. Lovecraft, 1915.

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• Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Life, Character, Men

  Letter to "The Keicomolo" - Kleiner, Cole, and Moe (October 1916), in "Selected Letters I, 1911-1924" edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, (p. 27), 1964.

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• Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Reality, Anomalies, Phases

  H. P. Lovecraft (2010). “Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft”, p.139, Lulu.com

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• Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Issues, Greed, Cosmos

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• The unknown ... became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Spheres, Reason, Source

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “The Classic Horror Stories”, p.413, OUP Oxford

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• The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Dream, Spiritual, Men

  H. P. Lovecraft (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of H. P. Lovecraft (Illustrated)”, p.1698, Delphi Classics

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• I can look back . . . at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust - a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Emotional, Two, Foundation

  Letter to August Derleth (1929), in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, (p. 307), 1996.

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