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Lovecraft Quotations ![]() |
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The following quotes come from Lovecraft’s fiction, poems, essays, and
letters. Wikiquote has over
125 quotations and Andrew M. Kuchling’s web site has over 300
H.P. Lovecraft
Quotes.
My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. (“The Tomb”, June 1917) I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth. (“The
Tomb”, June 1917) I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . . (“From
Beyond”, 16 November 1920) Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous. (“The Picture in the House”,
12 December 1920)
But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind. (“[In
Defence of Dagon]: The Defence Remains Open!”, April 1921) That same night saw the beginning of the second Arkham horror—the horror that to me eclipsed the plague itself. (“Herbert
West—Reanimator”, early October 1921 to mid-June 1922) My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me. (“He”, 11 August
1925) The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. (“Supernatural Horror in
Literature”, November 1925 to May 1927) The one test of the really weird 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. (“Supernatural Horror in Literature”,
November 1925 to May 1927) Well—the train sped on, & I experienced silent convulsions of joy in returning step by step to a waking & tri-dimensional life. New Haven—New London—& then quaint Mystic, with its colonial hillside & landlocked cove. Then at last a still subtler magick fill’d the air—nobler roofs & steeples, with the train rushing airily above them on its lofty viaduct—Westerly—in His Majesty’s Province of RHODE-ISLAND & PROVIDENCE-PLANTATIONS! GOD SAVE THE KING!! Intoxication follow’d—Kingston—East Greenwich with its steep Georgian alleys climbing up from the railway—Apponaug & its ancient roofs—Auburn—just outside the city limits—I fumble with bags & wraps in a desperate effort to appear calm—THEN—a delirious marble dome outside the window—a hissing of air brakes—a slackening of speed—surges of ecstasy & dropping of clouds from my eyes & mind—HOME—UNION STATION—PROVIDENCE!!!! (Letter to Frank Belknap Long, 1 May 1926) I am Providence, & Providence is myself—together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro’ the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee’s ice-clad peak! (Letter to James Ferdinand Morton, 16 May 1926) 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 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. (“The Call of
Cthulhu”, August or September 1926)
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. (“The Silver Key”, early November
1926) West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs. (“The Colour out of Space”, March
1927) ![]() (Letter to
Farnsworth Wright, 5 July 1927) 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. Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. (“The Dunwich Horror”, August
1928) Man rules now where They ruled once; They shall soon rule where man rules now. After summer is winter, and after winter summer. They wait patient and potent, for here shall They reign again. (“The Dunwich Horror”, August
1928)
I certainly do not disagree with you concerning the essential solitude of the individual, for it seems to me the plainest of all truths that no highly organised and freely developed mind can possibly envisage an external world having much in common with the external world invisaged by any other mind. (Letter to August W. Derleth, 19 or 26 December 1930) It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let 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. (At the Mountains of
Madness, 24 February to 22 March 1931) There was a kind of intoxication in being lord of a visible world (albeit a miniature one) and determining the flow of its events. (Letter to J. Vernon Shea, 8 November
1933) O Floridian More Fortunate than you can Realise... (Letter to Robert H. Barlow, 10?
February 1934) | ||||||||||||||||||
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