H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

211 Sourced Quotes

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
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

H. P. Lovecraft
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

H. P. Lovecraft
One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

H. P. Lovecraft
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

H. P. Lovecraft
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

H. P. Lovecraft
As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.

H. P. Lovecraft
No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.

H. P. Lovecraft
I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla.

H. P. Lovecraft
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.

H. P. Lovecraft
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.

H. P. Lovecraft
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
When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.

H. P. Lovecraft
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
Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.

H. P. Lovecraft
I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government--but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops.

H. P. Lovecraft
So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.

H. P. Lovecraft
Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth.

H. P. Lovecraft
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal

H. P. Lovecraft
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
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that is seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than to worship it.

H. P. Lovecraft
Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.

H. P. Lovecraft
Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos--to the unknown--which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.

H. P. Lovecraft
That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

H. P. Lovecraft
Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.

H. P. Lovecraft
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.

H. P. Lovecraft
Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.

H. P. Lovecraft
I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge.

H. P. Lovecraft
There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought tp stand prepared for any sort of action at any time.

H. P. Lovecraft
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