My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight,
and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but
sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl
dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of
rhythmical throbbing ... and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a
terrible one indeed.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Transition of Juan Romero"

There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those
who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Street"

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Street"

In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Descendant"

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

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and
adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and
groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in
these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read
and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but
confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from
the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Tomb"

Just before dawn Arcturus winks ruddily from above the cemetery on the low
hillock, and Coma Berenices shimmers weirdly afar off in the mysterious east;
but still the Pole Star leers down from the same place in the black vault,
winking hideously like an insane watching eye which strives to convey some
strange message, yet recalls nothing save that it once had a message to convey.
Sometimes, when it is cloudy, I can sleep.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Polaris"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Beyond The Wall of Sleep"

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret
lore of ocean.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The White Ship"

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean
is not silent.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The White Ship"

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and
the dreams of Time.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The White Ship"

In the land of Sona-Nyl there is neither time nor space, neither suffering nor
death.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The White Ship"

I yearned mightily to enter this fascinating yet repellent city, and besought
the bearded man to land me at the stone pier by the huge carven gate Akariel;
but he gently denied my wish, saying: "Into Thalarion, the City of a Thousand
Wonders, many have passed but none returned. Therein walk only daemons and mad
things that are no longer men, and the streets are white with the unburied
bones of those who have looked upon the eidolon Lathi, that reigns over the
city."
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The White Ship"

For the cat is cryptic, and close to Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from
forgotten cities in Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle's lords, and
heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and
he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers
that which she hath forgotten.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Cats of Ulthar"

Very sleek and fat did the cats appear, and sonorous with purring content.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Cats of Ulthar"

But he was unmoved, and cried: "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, "The Temple"

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.
Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the
ultimate exterminator of our human species -- if separate species we be -- for
its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if
loosed upon the world.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His
         Family"

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur
Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and His
         Family"

Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they
strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked
ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Celephaïs"

There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the
stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we
think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are
dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Celephaïs"

But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and
gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging
murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and
stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses
along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back
through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were
wise and unhappy.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Celephaïs"

That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a
mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator,
for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and
action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and
unimaginable if he succeed.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "From Beyond"

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick
up their ears after midnight.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "From Beyond"

I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and
madness...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "From Beyond"

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"

By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful
in their sins. Erring as all mortals must, they were forced by their rigid code
to seek concealment above all else; so that they came to use less and less
taste in what they concealed.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"

Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has
lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath
to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. Sometimes one feels that
it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"

Queer haow a *cravin'* gits a holt on ye -- As ye love the Almighty, young man,
don't tell nobody, but I swar ter Gawd thet picter begun ta make me *hungry fer
victuals I couldn't raise nor buy* -- here, set still, what's ailin' ye? ...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Picture in the House"

These folk say that on a table in a bare room on the ground floor are many
peculiar bottles, in each a small piece of lead suspended pendulum-wise from a
string. And they say that the Terrible Old Man talks to these bottles,
addressing them by such names as Jack, Scar-Face, Long Tom, Spanish Joe,
Peters, and Mate Ellis, and that whenever he speaks to a bottle the little lead
pendulum within makes certain definite vibrations as if in answer. Those who
have watched the tall, lean, Terrible Old Man in these peculiar conversations,
do not watch him again.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Terrible Old Man"

I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered
warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to
himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and
out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver
in dark and lonely places.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

I remember when Nyarlathotep came to my city the great, the old, the terrible
city of unnumbered crimes.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Nyarlathotep"

"That is not dead which can eternal lie / And with strange aeons even death may
die."
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting the _Necronomicon_, in "The Nameless City"

Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil
only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but
is not life made of beauty and song? ... Toil without song is like a weary
journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing?
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Quest of Iranon"

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Outsider"

Despite my most careful searches and investigations, I have never since been
able to find the Rue d'Auseil. But I am not wholly sorry; either for this or
for the loss in undreamable abysses of the closely written sheets which alone
could have explained the music of Erich Zann.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Music of Erich Zann"

Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West -- Re-Animator"

I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of
extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and Winifred Virginia Jackson, "The Crawling Chaos"

And when the smoke cleared away, and I sought to look upon the earth, I beheld
against the background of cold, humorous stars only the dying sun and the pale
mournful planets searching for their sister.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and Winifred Virginia Jackson, "The Crawling Chaos"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Ex Oblivione"

... for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more
terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Ex Oblivione"

It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when
one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West
were uncommon.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Reanimator"

It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for
it is obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to
similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a
particular circumstance.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Reanimator"

... West had emerged with a soul calloused and seared, and a hardened eye which
sometimes glanced with a kind of hideous and calculating appraisal at men of
especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique. Toward the last I
became acutely afraid of West, for he began to look at me that way.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Reanimator"

Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all
-- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Reanimator"

They imply that I am either a madman or a murderer -- probably I am mad. But I
might not be mad if those accursed tomb-legions had not been so silent.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Herbert West--Reanimator"

Men of learning suspect it little, and ignore it mostly.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Hypnos"

Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments --
inarticulateness.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Hypnos"

There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, brass, and wood-wind, on
which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and
cacodaemoniacal ghastliness ...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Hound"

We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood,
landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight. These pastimes were to
us the most exquisite form of aesthetic expression, and we gave their details a
fastidious technical care.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Hound"

Alien it indeed was to all art and literature which sane and balanced readers
know, but we recognized it as the thing hinted of in the forbidden Necronomicon
of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, the first mention of the Necronomicon, in "The
         Hound"

As we hastened from that abhorrent spot, the stolen amulet in St. John's
pocket, we thought we saw the bats descend in a body to the earth we had so
lately rifled, as if seeking for some cursed and unholy nourishment. But the
autumn moon shone weak and pale, and we could not be sure. So, too, as we
sailed the next day away from Holland to our home, we thought we heard the
faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background. But the autumn
wind moaned sad and wan, and we could not be sure.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Hound"

History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after
everything else ended in mocking Satanism.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Lurking Fear"

Besides, he added, my constant talk about "unnamable" and "unmentionable"
things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an
author.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Unnamable"

We know things, he said, only through our five senses or our religious
intuitions; wherefore it is quite impossible to refer to any object or
spectacle which cannot be clearly depicted by the solid definitions of fact or
the correct doctrines of theology -- preferably those of the
Congregationalists, with whatever modifications tradition and Sir Arthur Conan
Doyle may supply.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Unnamable"

The witchcraft terror is a horrible ray of light on what was stewing in men's
crushed brains, but even that is a trifle. There was no beauty; no freedom --
we can see that from the architectural and household remains, and the poisonous
sermons of the cramped divines. And inside that rusted iron strait-jacket
lurked gibbering hideousness, perversion, and diabolism. Here, truly, was the
apotheosis of the unnamable.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Unnamable"

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival"

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts
it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival"

I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend
bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival"

Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold
flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled
uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame,
trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or
sound brain ever wholly remember. They were not altogether crows, nor moles,
nor buzzards, nor ants, nor vampire bats, nor decomposed human beings, but
something I cannot and must not recall.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival"

"The nethermost caverns," wrote the mad Arab, "are not for the fathoming of
eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground
where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held
by no head."
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival", quoting the _Necronomicon_

For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his
charnel clay, but fats and instructs *the very worm that gnaws*; till out of
corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to
vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where
earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to
crawl.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival", quoting the _Necronomicon_

Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously
perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie
behind his yellow eyes.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"

Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"

Prying curiosity means death.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"

They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering
will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this
room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats
they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Rats in the Walls"

I dreamed that I was in the grasp of a great and horrible paw; a yellow, hairy,
five-clawed paw which had reached out of the earth to crush and engulf me. And
when I stopped to reflect what the paw was, it seemed to me that it was Egypt.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Under the Pyramids"

But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Under the Pyramids"

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shunned House"

We were not, as I have said, in any sense childishly superstitious, but
scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three
dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and
energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from numerous
authentic sources pointed to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great
power and, so far as the human point of view is concerned, exceptional
malignancy.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shunned House"

There are horrors beyond horrors, and this was one of those nuclei of all
dreamable hideousness which the cosmos saves to blast an accursed and unhappy
few.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shunned House"

The next spring no more pale grass and strange weeds came up in the shunned
house's terraced garden, and shortly afterward Carrington Harris rented the
place. It it still spectral, but its strangeness fascinates me, and I shall
find mixed with my relief a queer regret when it is torn down to make way for a
tawdry shop or vulgar apartment building. The barren old trees in the yard have
begun to bear small, sweet apples, and last year the birds nested in their
gnarled boughs.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shunned House"

This was a simple explanation which everyone could understand, and because
Malone was not a simple person he perceived that he had better let it suffice.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Horror at Red Hook"

More people enter Red Hook than leave it -- or at least, than leave it by the
landward side -- and those who are not loquacious are the likeliest to leave.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Horror at Red Hook"

I saw him on a sleepless night when I was walking desperately to save my soul
and my vision.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "He"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "He"

So instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blankness
and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had
ever dared to breathe before -- the unwhisperable secret of secrets -- that
fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old
New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in
fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with
queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "He"

Then one summer there came a philosopher into Kingsport. His name was Thomas
Olney, and he taught ponderous things in a college by Narragansett Bay. With
stout wife and romping children he came, and his eyes were weary with seeing
the same things for many years, and thinking the same well-disciplined
thoughts.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist"

Then Olney saw lingering against the translucent squares of each of the little
dim windows in succession a queer black outline as the caller moved
inquisitively about before leaving; and he was glad his host had not answered
the knocking. For there are strange objects in the great abyss, and the seeker
of dreams must take care not to stir up or meet the wrong ones.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist"

Then the shadows began to gather; first little furtive ones under the table,
and then bolder ones in the dark panelled corners.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist"

And ever since that hour, through dull dragging years of greyness and
weariness, the philosopher has laboured and eaten and slept and done
uncomplaining the suitable deeds of a citizen. Not any more does he long for
the magic of farther hills, or sigh for secrets that peer like green reefs from
a bottomless sea. The sameness of his days no longer gives him sorrow, and
well-disciplined thoughts have grown enough for his imagination.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist"

And they do not wish quaint Kingsport with its climbing lanes and archaic
gables to drag listless down the years while voice by voice the laughing chorus
grows stronger and wilder in that unknown and terrible eyrie where mists and
the dreams of mists stop to rest on their way from the sea to the skies.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist"

All these things, however, the Elder Ones only may decide; and meanwhile the
morning mist still comes up by that lonely vertiginous peak with the steep
ancient house, that grey low-eaved house where none is seen but where evening
brings furtive lights while the north wind tells of strange revels.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist"

And when tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed
cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapours
flock to heaven laden with lore; and Kingsport, nestling uneasy on its lesser
cliffs below that awesome hanging sentinel of rock, sees oceanward only a
mystic whiteness, as if the cliff's rim were the rim of all earth, and the
solemn bells of the buoys tolled free in the aether of faery.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Strange High House in the Mist"

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

... another conception somehow shocked me more than all the rest -- a scene in
an unknown vault, where scores of the beasts crowded about one who held a
well-known Boston guide-book and was evidently reading aloud. All were pointing
to a certain passage, and every face seemed so distorted with epileptic and
reverberant laughter that I almost thought I heard the fiendish echoes. The
title of the picture was, "Holmes, Lowell, and Longfellow Lie Buried in Mount
Auburn".
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Pickman's Model"

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental
piecing together of separated things -- in this case an old newspaper item and
the notes of a dead professor.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Above these apparent hieroglyphics was a figure of evidently pictorial intent,
though its impressionistic execution forbade a very clear idea of its nature.
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
pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary
wings, but it was the *general outline* of the whole which made it most
shockingly frightful.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

What seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters
painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn. ("In his house at R'lyeh
dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.")
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the
sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no
longer lived, They would never really die.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret
priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and
resume His rule of earth. 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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

I now felt gnawing at my vitals that dark terror which will never leave me till
I, too, am at rest; "accidentally" or otherwise.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness,
silence, and solitude. I found it in the glare of mid-afternoon, in the
clangour of a metropolis, and in the teeming midst of a shabby and commonplace
rooming-house with a prosaic landlady and two stalwart men by my side.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Cool Air"

Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown
away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and
innocence.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Silver Key"

It was after this that he cultivated deliberate illusion, and dabbled in the
notions of the bizarre and the eccentric as an antidote for the commonplace.
Most of these, however, soon shewed their poverty and barrenness; and he saw
that the popular doctrines of occultism are as dry and inflexible as those of
science, yet without even the slender palliative of truth to redeem them.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Silver Key"

Gross stupidity, falsehood, and muddled thinking are not dream; and form no
escape from life to a mind trained above their own level.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Silver Key"

There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer
can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to
traverse these mazes. Whether or not he will ever come back, I cannot say.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Silver Key"

Certainly, I look forward impatiently to the sight of that great silver key,
for in its cryptical arabesques there may stand symbolised all the aims and
mysteries of a blindly impersonal cosmos.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Silver Key"

It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such
dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"

No sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the green grass
and leafage; but everywhere those hectic and prismatic variants of some
diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of
earth. The Dutchman's breeches became a thing of sinister menace, and the
bloodroots grew insolent in their chromatic perversion.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Colour Out of Space"

One may picture him yet as he was in those days; tall, slim, and blond, with
studious eyes and a slight stoop, dressed somewhat carelessly, and giving a
dominant impression of harmless awkwardness rather than attractiveness.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

The nurse used to stop and sit on the benches of Prospect Terrace to chat with
policemen; and one of the child's first memories was of the great westward sea
of hazy roofs and domes and steeples and far hills which he saw one winter
afternoon from that great railed embankment, all violet and mystic against a
fevered, apocalyptic sunset of reds and golds and purples and curious greens.
The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive silhouette, its
crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus
clouds that barred the flaming sky.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

I say to you againe, doe not call up Any that you can not put downe; by the
Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your
Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater
shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, a letter from Simon Orne, in "The Case of Charles
         Dexter Ward"

Just beyond Elder Snow's church some of the men turned back to take a parting
look at Providence lying outspread under the early spring stars. Steeples and
gables rose dark and shapely, and salt breezes swept up gently from the cove
north of the Bridge. Vega was climbing above the great hill across the water,
whose crest of trees was broken by the roof-line of the unfinished College
edifice. At the foot of that hill, and along the narrow mounting lanes of its
side, the old town dreamed; Old Providence, for whose safety and sanity so
monstrous and colossal a blasphemy was about to be wiped out.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

Old Providence! It was this place and the mysterious forces of its long,
continuous history which had brought him into being, and which had drawn him
back toward marvels and secrets whose boundaries no prophet might fix. Here lay
the arcana, wondrous or dreadful as the case might be, for which all his years
of travel and application had been preparing him.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

A taxicab whirled him through Post Office Square with its glimpse of the river,
the old Market House, and the head of the bay, and up the steep curved slope of
Waterman Street to Prospect, where the vast gleaming dome and sunset-flushed
Ionic columns of the Christian Science Church beckoned northward. Then eight
squares past the fine old estates his childish eyes had known, and the quaint
brick sidewalks so often trodden by his youthful feet. And at last the little
white overtaken farmhouse on the right, on the left the classic Adam porch and
stately facade of the great brick house where he was born. It was twilight, and
Charles Dexter Ward had come home.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

"I have brought to light a monstrous abnormality, but I did it for the sake of
knowledge. Now for the sake of all life and Nature you must help me thrust it
back into the dark again."
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, charles Dexter Ward's letter, in "The Case of
         Charles Dexter Ward"

That Thomas Sabin's Boston coach was "damn'd uncomfortable" old letters may
well have told; but what healthy antiquarian could recall how the creaking of
Epenetus Olney's new signboard (the gaudy crown he set up after he took to
calling his tavern the Crown Coffee House) was exactly like the first few notes
of the new jazz piece all the radios in Pawtuxet were playing?
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"

Mystery hung about it as clouds about a fabulous unvisited mountain; and as
Carter stood breathless and expectant on that balustraded parapet there swept
up to him the poignancy and suspense of almost-vanished memory, the pain of
lost things and the maddening need to place again what once had been an awesome
and momentous place.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

In the tunnels of that twisted wood, whose low prodigious oaks twine groping
boughs and shine dim with the phosphorescence of strange fungi, dwell the
furtive and secretive zoogs; who know many obscure secrets of the dream-world
and a few of the waking world, since the wood at two places touches the lands
of men, though it would be disastrous to say where.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

There he would turn sharply aside, for at that spot a mighty slab of stone
rests on the forest floor; and those who have dared approach it say that it
bears an iron ring three feet wide. Remembering the archaic circle of great
mossy rocks, and what it was possibly set up for, the Zoogs do not pause near
that expansive slab with its huge ring; for they realise that all which is
forgotten need not necessarily be dead, and they would not like to see the slab
rise slowly and deliberately.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"

So, Atal said, it would be much better to let all gods alone except in tactful
prayers.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath"

A yowl now came from the farther peak, and the old leader paused abruptly in
his conversation. It was one of the army's outposts, stationed on the highest
of the mountains to watch the one foe which Earth's cats fear; the very large
and peculiar cats from Saturn, who for some reason have not been oblivious of
the charm of our moon's dark side. They are leagued by treaty with the evil
toad-things, and are notoriously hostile to our earthly cats; so that at this
juncture a meeting would have been a somewhat grave matter.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

But Carter preferred to look at them than at his captors, which were indeed
shocking and uncouth black beings with smooth, oily, whale-like surfaces,
unpleasant horns that curved inward toward each other, bat-wings whose beating
made no sound, ugly prehensile paws, and barbed tails that lashed needlessly
and disquietingly. And worst of all, they never spoke or laughed, and never
smiled because they had no faces at all to smile with, but only a suggestive
blankness where a face ought to be. All they ever did was clutch and fly and
tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

There, on a tombstone of 1768 stolen from the Granary Burying Ground in Boston,
sat a ghoul which was once the artist Richard Upton Pickman.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

For a ghoul is a ghoul, and at best an unpleasant companion for man.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

Carter was there to greet them, and the sight of shapely, wholesome cats was
indeed good for his eyes after the things he had seen and walked with in the
abyss.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the
sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming
music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place,
and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

Once a lookout reported fires on the hills to the east, but the sleepy captain
said they had better not be looked at too much, since it was highly uncertain
just who or what had lit them.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

It seems that these men have an aura not of earth about them, though that is
not the reason why no cat will sail on their ships. The reason for this is that
Inquanok holds shadows which no cat can endure, so that in all that cold
twilight realm there is never a cheering purr or a homely mew.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

Then suddenly the clouds thinned and the stars shone spectrally above. All
below was still black, but those pallid beacons in the sky seemed alive with a
meaning and directiveness they had never possessed elsewhere. It was not that
the figures of the constellations were different, but that the same familiar
shapes now revealed a significance they had formerly failed to make plain.
Everything focussed toward the north; every curve and asterism of the
glittering sky became part of a vast design whose function was to hurry first
the eye and then the whole observer onward to some secret and terrible goal of
convergence beyond the frozen waste that stretched endlessly ahead.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

It was a song, but not the song of any voice. Night and the spheres sang it,
and it was old when space and Nyarlathotep and the Other Gods were born.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"

Then too, the natives are mortally afraid of the numerous whippoorwills which
grow vocal on warm nights. It is vowed that the birds are psychopomps lying in
wait for the souls of the dying, and that they time their eerie cries in unison
with the sufferer's struggling breath. If they can catch the fleeing soul when
it leaves the body, they instantly flutter away chittering in daemoniac
laughter; but if they fail, they subside gradually into a disappointed silence.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dunwich Horror"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_ in "The Dunwich
         Horror"

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. He
knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break
through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They
still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_ in "The Dunwich
         Horror"

They walk unseen and foul in lonely places where the Words have been spoken and
the Rites howled through at their Seasons. The wind gibbers with Their voices,
and the earth mutters with Their consciousness. They bend the forest and crush
the city, yet may not forest or city behold the hand that smites. Kadath in the
cold waste hath known Them, and what man knows Kadath?
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_ in "The Dunwich
         Horror"

As a foulness shall ye know Them. Their hand is at your throats, yet ye see
Them not; and Their habitation is even one with your guarded threshold.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_ in "The Dunwich
         Horror"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, quoting from the _Necronomicon_ in "The Dunwich
         Horror"

Even the sunlight assumed a supernal glamour, as if some special atmosphere or
exhalation mantled the whole region. I had seen nothing like it before save in
the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives.
Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and
through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"

Never was a sane man more dangerously close to the arcana of basic entity --
never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that
transcends form and force and symmetry.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"

I learned whence Cthulhu *first* came, and why half the great temporary stars
of history had flared forth. I guessed -- from hints which made even my
informant pause timidly -- the secret behind the Magellanic Clouds and globular
nebulae, and the black truth veiled by the immemorial allegory of Tao.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Whisperer in Darkness"

The sense of a throwback was all the stronger because I felt instinctively that
the common problem of the Spaniard and myself was one of such abysmal
timelessness -- of such unholy and unearthly eternity -- that the scant four
hundred years between us bulked as nothing in comparison. It took no more than
a single look at that monstrous and insidious cylinder to make me realize the
dizzying gulfs that yawned between all men of the known earth and the primal
mysteries it represented. Before that gulf Pànfilo de Zamacona and I stood side
by side; just as Aristotle and I, or Cheops and I, might have stood.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, "The Mound"

Never mix up with secret and ultimate horror, young man, if you value your
immortal soul.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, "Medusa's Coil"

Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than
arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation.
The sight of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over
to cobwebs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and
aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth"

Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; yet if I
suppressed what will seem extravagant and incredible there would be nothing
left.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

Every incident of that four-and-a-half hour flight is burned into my
recollection because of its crucial position in my life. It marked my loss, at
the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind
possesses through its accustomed conception of external Nature and Nature's
laws.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

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, "At the Mountains of Madness"

We did not mention, I think, their display of the same uneasiness when sniffing
around the queer greenish soapstones and certain other objects in the
disordered region; objects including scientific instruments, aeroplanes, and
machinery both at the camp and at the boring, whose parts had been loosened,
moved, or otherwise tampered with by winds that must have harboured singular
curiosity and investigativeness.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

There were geometrical forms for which an Euclid could scarcely find a name --
cones of all degrees of irregularity and truncation; terraces of every sort of
provocative disproportion; shafts with odd bulbous enlargements; broken columns
in curious groups; and five-pointed or five-ridged arrangements of mad
grotesqueness.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

Imagination could conceive almost anything in connexion with this place.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

These vertebrates, as well as an infinity of other life forms -- animal and
vegetable, marine, terrestrial, and aërial -- were the products of unguided
evolution acting on life-cells made by the Old Ones, but escaping beyond their
radius of attention. They had been suffered to develop unchecked because they
had not come in conflict with the dominant beings. Bothersome forms, of course,
were mechanically exterminated. It interested us to see in some of the very
last and most decadent sculptures a shambling, primitive mammal, used sometimes
for food and sometimes as an amusing buffoon by the land dwellers, whose
vaguely simian and human foreshadowings were unmistakable.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

Perhaps we were mad -- for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains
of madness? But I think I can detect something of the same spirit -- albeit in
a less extreme form -- in the men who stalk deadly beasts through African
jungles to photograph them or study their habits. Half paralyzed with terror
though we were, there was nevertheless fanned within us a blazing flame of awe
and curiosity which triumphed in the end.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

    Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were
the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish
jest on them -- as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or
cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste -
and this was their tragic homecoming.
    They had not been even savages -- for what indeed had they done? That awful
awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch -- perhaps an attack by the furry,
frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the
equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia ...
poor Lake, poor Gedney... and poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had
they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence
and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen
and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates,
vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

The penguins alone could not have saved us, but in conjunction with the mist
they seem to have done so.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

"South Station Under -- Washington Under -- Park Street Under-Kendall --
Central -- Harvard -- " The poor fellow was chanting the familiar stations of
the Boston-Cambridge tunnel that burrowed through our peaceful native soil
thousands of miles away in New England, yet to me the ritual had neither
irrelevance nor home feeling. It had only horror, because I knew unerringly the
monstrous, nefandous analogy that had suggested it.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's "thing that
should not be"; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing
subway train as one sees it from a station platform -- the great black front
looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with
strangely coloured lights and filling the prodigious burrow as a piston fills a
cylinder.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

The grey half-daylight of the vast circular space sobered us somewhat; but we
did not go near those cached sledges or look again at poor Gedney and the dog.
They have a strange and titanic mausoleum, and I hope the end of this planet
will find them still undisturbed.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "At the Mountains of Madness"

Possibly Gilman ought not to have studied so hard. Non-Euclidean calculus and
quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with
folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality
behind the ghoulish hints of the Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the
chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Dreams in the Witch House"

But he was still content, for at one mighty venture he was to learn all.
Damnation, he reflected, is but a word bandied about by those whose blindness
leads them to condemn all who can see, even with a single eye.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price, "Through the Gates of the
         Silver Key"

He wondered at the vast conceit of those who had babbled of the *malignant*
Ancient Ones, as if They could pause from their everlasting dreams to wreak a
wrath on mankind. As well, he thought, might a mammoth pause to visit frantic
vengeance on an angleworm.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price, "Through the Gates of the
         Silver Key"

The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that
Substance is the Great Imposter.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and E. Hoffman Price, "Through the Gates of the
         Silver Key"

If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the
cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest
mention is paralysing. He must, too, be placed on guard against a specific,
lurking peril which, though it will never engulf the whole race, may impose
monstrous and unguessable horrors upon certain venturesome members of it.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

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, "The Shadow Out of Time"

Madness, of course -- but had I not now stumbled into a nighted world as mad as
I?
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

If the thing were there -- and if I were not dreaming -- the implications would
be quite beyond the power of the human spirit to bear. What tormented me most
was my momentary inability to feel that my surroundings were a dream.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too
truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of
time.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

    I did not bring back the metal case that would have been a proof, and so
far those subterrene corridors have not been found.
    If the laws of the universe are kind, they will never be found.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "The Shadow Out of Time"

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 and William Lumley, "The Diary of Alonzo Typer"

Likewise are there dread survivals of things older and more potent than man;
things that have blasphemously straggled down through the aeons to ages never
meant for them; monstrous entities that have lain sleeping endlessly in
incredible crypts and remote caverns, outside the laws of reason and causation,
and ready to be waked by such blasphemers as shall know their dark forbidden
signs and furtive passwords.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and William Lumley, "The Diary of Alonzo Typer"

As the end approaches I feel more kindly toward the things. In the scale of
cosmic entity who can say which species stands higher, or more nearly
approaches a space-wide organic norm -- theirs or mine?
      -- H.P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling, "In the Walls of Eryx"

Things seen by the inward sight, like those flashing visions which comes as we
drift into the blankness of sleep, are more vivid and meaningful to us in that
form than when we have sought to weld them with reality.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them rests no
yoke of line or hue.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

There were painted women in tinsel adornments, and bored men who were no longer
young -- a throng of foolish marionettes perched on the lip of the ocean-chasm;
unseeing, unwilling to see what lay above them and about, in the multitudinous
grandeur of the stars and the leagues of the night ocean.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

When I reached my high residence I knew that I had passed no one during the
mile's walk from the village, and yet there somehow lingered an impression that
I had been all the while accompanied by the spirit of the lonely sea.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

It was astonishing the number of useless things people found to do.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

The morning ocean, glimmering with a reflected mist of blue-white cloud and
expanding diamond foam, has the eyes of one who ponders on strange things; and
her intricately woven webs, through which dart a myriad coloured fishes, hold
the air of some great idle thing which will arise presently from the hoary
immemorial chasms and stride upon the land.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of
a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her
mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these
memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share
her gaiety or remorse.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

The ocean ruled my life during the whole of that late summer; demanding it as
recompense for the healing she had brought me.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

There were drownings at the beach that year; and while I heard of these only
casually (such is our indifference to a death which does not concern us, and to
which we are not witness), I knew that their details were unsavoury.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

Frequently, in a momentary perception, we feel that a feathery landscape (for
instance), a woman's dress along the curve of a road by afternoon, or the
solidity of a century-defying tree against the pale morning sky (the conditions
more than the object being significant) hold something precious, some golden
virtue that we must grasp.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this
overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing
to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the
emotion of grief a wasted thing.
      -- R.H. Barlow and H.P. Lovecraft, "The Night Ocean"

It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality.
The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's
end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally
I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than
oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we
were born, yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return?
It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "In Defence of Dagon"

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and
strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands
from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment
from every-day life.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to
hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and
fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the
stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only
the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a
sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of
breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present,
and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness
becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain -- a
malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which
are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of
unplumbed space.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

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.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty,
the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge
must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction
as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross
superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set
aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the
darkness of mediaeval disbelief.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to the Providence Evening News,
         September 5 1914

Round pegs find round holes, square pegs find square holes. And by the same
token, albeit with rather greater difficulty, I am sure that there must
somewhere be a corresponding hole for such a peg as proverbial metaphor may dub
trapezohedral!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter applying for a job

As, gazing on each comic act / I stare at your perfection, / I find it hard to
face the fact / That you're a mere projection.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, "To Charlie of the Comics", in a letter to
         Reinhardt Kleiner, September 30 1915

Frankly, I cannot conceive how any thoughtful man can really be happy. There is
really nothing in the universe to live for, and unless one can dismiss thought
and speculation from his mind, he is liable to be engulfed by the very
immensity of creation. It is vastly better that he should amuse himself with
religion, or any other convenient palliative to reality which comes to hand.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October
         1916

I am no great success in this world, and doubtless will not be in the next, but
when it comes to a catalogue of crimes and evils I really cannot think of any
worse offense than writing bad verse and not rolling my "rrr...s".
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, February 3 1918

Foolish, do I hear you say? Undoubtedly! I had better be a consistent
pragmatist: get drunk and confine myself to a happy, swinish, contented little
world -- the gutter -- till some policeman's No. 13 boot intrudes upon my
philosophic repose.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, May 15 1918

As to "Sherlock Holmes" -- I used to be infatuated with him! I read every
Sherlock Holmes story published, and even organised a detective agency when I
was thirteen, arrogating to myself the proud pseudonym of S.H. ...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Alfred Galpin, May 27 1918

About the word "peruse" -- possibly I do employ it to excess, but Mr Addison
was ever my model of style in prose.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Alfred Galpin, May 27 1918

My mother, showing no signs of recovery, has gone to a hospital, where she is
receiving the most expert care which medical science can afford. I strongly
hope the change will benefit her. It has a good chance of doing so, since many
features of diet & regimen which the physicians are prescribing, are directly
opposite to those prescribed by the previous practitioner.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, March 19 1919

Of course, I am unfamiliar with amatory phenomena save through cursory reading.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, September 27
         1919

Then I perceived with horror that I was growing too old for pleasure. Ruthless
Time had set its fell claw upon me, and I was seventeen. Big boys do not play
in toy houses and mock gardens, so I was obliged to turn over my world in
sorrow to another and younger boy who dwelt across the lot from me. And since
that time I have not delved in the earth or laid out paths and roads. There is
too much wistful memory in such procedure, for the fleeting joy of childhood
may never be recaptured. Adulthood is hell.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to the Gallomo (Galpin, Lovecraft, and
         Moe), 1920

I was 23 years of age, and realised that my infirmities would withhold me from
success in the world at large. Feeling like a cipher, I felt that I might well
be erased.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, March 7 1920

I had a visitor the other night, who gave me an idea for a good story. He was a
furry, four-footed young visitor, with a black coat, white gloves and boots,
and white around the tip of his nose and the tip of his tail. He sat in a chair
near me, purring most inspiringly, when I permitted my fancy to consider his
ancient race and heritage.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, May 21 1920

They invited me to their meeting of March 10, which was supposed to be in
honour of the not unknown Santus Patricius -- the Scotsman who drave from
Hibernia all the snakes save the Sinn Fein.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, April 23 1921

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what
is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own
pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to
weep for him within.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, April 23 1921

Anything savouring of quiet and tameness is maddeningly abhorrent to me -- not
in actual life, for that I wish as placid as possible; but in thought, which is
my more vivid life.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, May 13 1921

I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to
feel.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, May 13 1921

What merriment I have is always derived from the satirical principle, and what
sadness I have, is not so much personal, as a vast and terrible melancholy at
the pain and futility of all existence in a blind and purposeless cosmos.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, May 13 1921

When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the
coral insect -- designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon
to delight in after he is dead.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, May 3 1922

David V. Bush is a short, plump fellow of about forty-five, with a bland face,
bald head, and very fair taste in attire. He is actually an immensely good sort
-- kindly, affable, winning, and smiling. Probably he has to be in order to
induce people to let him live after they have read his verse.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Anne Tillery Renshaw, June 14 1922

With becoming modesty he announces his intention of revolutionising the country
with his new gospel of dynamic psychology; which has all the virtues of "New
Thought" plus a saving vagueness which prevents its absurdity from being
exposed before the credulous public amongst whom his missionary labours lie.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Anne Tillery Renshaw, June 14 1922

He enjoys life -- as do all who are spared the curse of intelligence.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Anne Tillery Renshaw, June 14 1922

I'm now too thoroughly cynical to expect much of amateurdom, or to give many
damns about it; save as a perpetually chaotic mess from which a few odd souls
can get some impetus toward literary development ... or at least toward a
fairly comfortable literary disillusion.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, April 22 1923

Physical life and experience, with the narrowings of artistic vision they
create in the majority, are the objects of my most profoud contempt. It is for
this reason that I despise Bohemians, who think it essential to art to lead
wild lives. My loathing is not from the standpoint of Puritan morality, but
from that of aesthetic independence -- I revolt at the notion that physical
life is of any value or significance. To me the ideal artist is a gentleman who
shows his contempt for life by continuing in the quiet ways of his ancestors,
leaving his fancy free to explore refulgent and amazing spheres.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, May 13 1923

Ideas are very foolish -- they mean nothing and lead nowhere. Rest, beauty,
tranquility -- these only have value.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, May 26 1923

I have no opinions -- I believe in nothing -- but assume for the time whatever
opinion amuses me or is opposite to that of the person or persons present.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, May 26 1923

Evening had come, and through silent, unillumined Colonial streets I made my
way to the station, glancing now and then at the arabesques of the tenebrous
steeples and Gothic vanes and singular chimney-pots as they stood limned before
the inscrutable and immemorial stars; the pale, langurous stars that saw
Portsmouth born, and that without a smile will see Portsmouth die.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, September 4 1923

I am lately inform'd that, all these weeks later, young Donald's first remark
on being introduc'd to Niagara Falls, was the exclamation: "Gee, what wou'd Mr.
Lovecraft say!" -- a thing which may be taken as evidence, that the youth is
not unimprest with volubility and flow, whether in aqueous torrents or in
childish old gentlemen.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 4
         1923

I hated monstrously to see him go, for he is a person of the most companionable
amiability, even if he does write down all his expenditures in a little green
note book for his wife to see.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 4
         1923

As to these limited editions and so forth -- I don't care for 'em at all. All I
want of a book is to have it in good clear type for my old eyes, clean, and
free from misprints. What edition it is, or who owned it in the past, isn't any
concern of mine; although I do like it to be in the "long S" if possible.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, October 7 1923

Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not
interfere with other people.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, October 7 1923

I was only fifteen minutes late -- a degree of promptness which will through
all my after life give me the sensation of being as punctual as a tradesman.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Samuel Loveman, January 5 1924

We ascended to the organ loft, and I endeavor'd to play _Yes, We Have no
Bananas_, but was balk'd by lack of power, since the machine is not a
self-starter.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Samuel Loveman, January 5 1924

I have always thought there is a peculiar fascination about provincial towns,
where time treads lightly and leaves curious byways, customs, and heritages;
all the more fascinating if the town be large enough to contain bewildering and
labyrinthine recesses, and little worlds unknown each to the other.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, January 8 1924

Habitations of men should never be *made* -- they should be sown, water'd,
weeded, tended, and allowed to *grow* by subtle processes. What makes a town
really lovely and fascinating, is the quaint irregularity which links it to its
geographical location -- the suggestions of hill and dale, river and shore --
and to the continuous history of its inhabitants -- the marks of original
settlement, slow expansion, and development in channels and directions
determin'd by the topography of the site and aspirations and genius of the
people. These things are all that make a city vivid and dramatick and human --
all that give it the captivating individuality which differentiates it from any
other city.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, January 26 1924

Happy indeed is that town which grew slowly enough to leave traces of the
gradual evolution from year to year, and gently enough to preserve the original
topographical lines of hill and shore -- the lines that are graceful because
born of Nature, and that find embodiment in curved streets, quaint slopes or
flights of steps, simple and dignify'd bridges, sea-walls, and embankments,
quiet nooks and terraces, and all other vestiges which show man's conformity to
Nature rather than man's artificial conquest of Nature by prosaic, repudiatory
feats of engineering.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, January 26 1924

If these ancient spots were fascinating in the busy hours of twilight, fancy
their utter and poignant charm in the sinister hours before dawn, when only
cats, criminals, astronomers, and poetic antiquarians roam the waking world!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mrs F.C. Clark, September 29-30
         1924

The town, brooding quietly in the Sabbath radiance despite the herds of
sightseers unloos'd upon it, does not at first impress one. The Monument is so
distant, the sky so vacant of tall buildings, and the ground so devoted to
parks, malls, and wide spaces, that one cannot gather the sense of compact and
active life which one usually associates with large cities.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, describing Washington DC, in a letter to Mrs F.C.
         Clark, April 21 1925

During this hospital period I had my first experience in lone housekeeping.
Aided by the written instructions of my wife I made coffee that I could
actually drink, and cooked spaghetti that I could actually eat -- and as a
matter of personal pride I kept the house swept and dusted.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, June 15 1925

Reaching the farmhouse by motor from the station, we found it quite tolerable
though somewhat lonely; and to my mind vastly enhanced by the lively presence
of a large family of irresistible gray kittens.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, June 15 1925

I like a tale to be told as directly and impersonally as possible, from an
angle of utter and absolute detachment.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, August 2 1925

It so happens that I am unable to take pleasure or interest in anything but a
mental re-creation of other & better days ... so in order to avoid the madness
which leads to violence & suicide I must cling to the few shreds of old days &
old ways which are left to me.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to an unknown correspondent, August 8
         1925

Yes -- such sensitivenesses of temperament are very inconvenient when one has
no money -- but it's easier to criticise than to cure them.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to an unknown correspondent, August 8
         1925

As I have always said, missionaries are infernal nuisances who ought to be kept
at home -- dull, solemn asses without scientific acumen or historical
perspective ...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mrs F.C. Clark, September 12-13
         1925

When my stuff is done it always disappoints me -- never quite presenting the
fulness of the picture I have in mind -- but since a crude fixation of the
image is better than nothing, I plug along & do the feeble best I can.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, September 20
         1925

Peste! Sacrebleu! Nom d'un Cochon vert! O Saint Dieu et Notre Dame de Montreal!
THIS GAWD-DAMN COLD!!!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 1925

Ineffective & injudicious I may be, but I trust I may never be inartistic or
ill-bred in my course of conduct.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to an unknown correspondent, December
         22-23 1925

Possess, O Flambeau of Patersonic Tenebrosity, a cardiac organ; and heap upon
my valueless cranium the carbonaceous symbols of Eblis' aeternal
conflagrations!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, January 5 1926

Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the
artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are
real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to
human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Walter J. Coates, March 30 1926

Yrs. for ghouls, afreets, and undertakers--
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, sign-off from a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman,
         April 23 1926

As to Long's notion that your work systematically contains phallic symbolism --
he picked that up at second-hand from Loveman, who seems to have done enough
delving in that line to see phalli in most things from church steeples to
mushrooms.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, May 14 1926

It's a pretty old world, after all, & we shall never learn much about the inner
nature of things...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, May 14 1926

You poets can't age -- split me, Sir, if Samuelus isn't a flaming youth still
from all his barren pole and uncertain equator!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, June 1926

As to what is meant by "weird" -- and of course weirdness is by no means
confined to horror -- I should say that the real criterion is *a strong
impression of the suspension of natural laws or the presence of unseen worlds
or forces close at hand*.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman, August 24
         1926

Besides the aesthetic, you have managed to work in the practical -- which is
always a sealed mystery to me.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman, September 8
         1926

I imagine that Wandrei must be rather a young chap -- though possessed of a
fund of imagery & command of language which will serve him well when he has
learnt the lessons of restraint & austerity of form form which come with later
life.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 12 1926

I can't get interested in it -- it doesn't even bore me enough to take my mind
off other boredoms.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, October 26 1926

This primary attention to plot is probably a wise choice on your part, because
to the weird writer plot is so much more difficult to achieve than atmosphere.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman, October 31
         1926

But in the end, atmosphere repays cultivation; because it is the final
criterion of convincingness or unconvincingness in any tale whose major appeal
is to the imagination.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman, October 31
         1926

And to think I read them ----- ----- proofs *five* ----- ----- times!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1926

As to eyeshades and reversed caps -- you can't convince me that either or both
is or are (a) worth getting indignant or critical about, or (b) any more
foolish than dozens of other accepted customs.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1926

Everything in the world outside primitive needs is the chance result of
inessential causes and random associations, and there's no real or solid
criterion by which one can condemn any particular manifestation of human
restlessness.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1926

In the more southerly portions the very earth sparkles with some shining powder
that the fanciful would call star dust -- but which I, as a veteran
mineralogist, know must come from the oxydising up of the neighbouring rocks --
which have mica or something. Being exceedingly charitable where expense is not
involved, I herewith enclose a very modest specimen as a nucleus of the
Theobald Collection of American Rocks, for which I shall expect a special wing
to be built at the museum.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 26 1926

All we may say is, that the more purely an aesthete a man is, the more likely
he is to prefer cats; since the superior grace, beauty, manners and neatness of
the cat cannot but conquer the fancy of any impartial observer emancipated from
mundane and ethical illusions.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, December 1926

We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a damn
whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded pretty, and
that's all we know and all we need to know!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, December 1926

You can get a fairly good bird's-eye view of literary modernism by reading Ben
Hecht's _Erik Dorn_ for prose, and T.S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_ for what
purports to be verse.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to August Derleth, January 2 1927

About Oscar Wilde -- it seems to me that he forms a prominent point in the
history of literature without having been supremely great himself.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to August Derleth, January 20 1927

No -- New York is dead, & the brilliancy which so impresses one from outside is
the phosphoresence of a maggoty corpse.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, February 10 1927

Sterling was a real poet, & the fact of his not fitting the age is purely the
age's fault.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, February 18
         1927

By this time I see pretty well what I'm driving at and how I'm doing it -- that
I'm a rather one-sided person whose only really burning interests are *the
past* and *the unknown* or *the strange*, and whose aestheticism in general is
more negative than positive -- i.e., a hatred of ugliness rather than an active
love of beauty.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, March 3 1927

I abhor broad prosaic highways with their implications of change, modernity,
and decadence, and make for the calm, untainted inner countryside whenever I
possibly can.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, March 3 1927

I conceived the idea that the great brownstone house was a malignly sentient
thing -- a dead, vampire creature which sucked something out of those within it
and implanted in them the seeds of some horrible and immaterial psychic growth.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, March 26 1927

It is the frank & cynical recognition of the inevitable limitations of people
in general which makes me absolutely indifferent instead of actively hostile
toward mankind.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, March 27 1927

If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the
Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure
ideals of the Victorians.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, April 1 1927

The vistas I relish most are those in which the sunset plays a transfiguring &
glorifying part.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, April 21 1927

Living things -- usually insane or idiotic members of the family -- concealed
in the garrets or secret rooms of old houses are or at least have been literal
realities in rural New England -- I was told by someone of how he stopped at a
lone farmhouse on some errand years ago, and was nearly frightened out of his
wits by the opening of a sliding panel in the kitchen wall, and the appearance
of the most horrible, dirt-caked, and matted-bearded face he had ever conceived
possible to exist!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, June 1927

Mere grotesqueness is very common; sly, malign madness sometimes lurks around
the corner; and berserk, revolting murder under peculiarly messy and clumsy
conditions is a matter of not infrequent record.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, June 1927

All the common, unadorned things have been thought and said and repeated a
thousand times before. The dull, prosaic world of usual feelings and events is
so well "written up" that nothing vital remains to be added.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, June 5 1927

And one may add, that the birth of a dear little chee-ild would *not* solve all
problems in glib nickleodeon fashion! Rather, it would be a complication
provocative of even more misery.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, June 12 1927

Chambers is like Rupert Hughes & a few other fallen Titans -- equipped with the
right brains & education, but wholly out of the habit of using them.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, June 24 1927

Now all my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws
and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast
cosmos-at-large.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Fransworth Wright, July 5 1927

Wandrei can tell you all there is to be told about the art of hitch-hiking,
whereby the expense of railway fare becomes as obsolete & quaint a memory as
the era of good taste in literature!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, July 15 1927

There are *twenty-eight* varieties this season, and we *sampled them all*
within the course of an hour.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, about ice cream, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe,
         July 30 1927

And now, at thirty-seven, I am gradually headed for pure antiquarianism and
architecture, and away from literature altogether! Heaven knows where I'll end
up -- but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I
particularly care to be.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, August 28 1927

Well, the orgy is over at last, and the Old Gentlemen is weakly gasping amidst
the prodigious welter of work which piled up during his absence. Shall I ever
see daylight again? Only Mana-Yood-Sushai can tell! I burrow -- I wallow -- and
still there press spectrally upon me the sinister shadows of imperative agenda.
Where did I mislay that cyanide? No matter, a revolver will do. But first I
must get those Bullen proofs out of the way!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 6
         1927

Of course, so far as personal taste goes, I'm no lover of humanity. To me cats
are in every way more graceful and worthy of respect -- but I don't try to
raise my personal bias to the spurious dignity of a dogmatic generality...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 6
         1927

That is the perennial grief of an architectural antiquarian -- in a city as
large as Providence or Boston something quaint is always being demolished in
the interest of alleged progress...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, September 22
         1927

As for your new novelette -- look here, young man, you'd better be mighty
careful how you treat your aged and dignified Grandpa as here! You mustn't make
me doing anything cheerful or wholesome, and remember that only the direst of
damnations can befit so inveterate a daemon of the cosmick abysses.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, September 24
         1727

I haven't very much energy or perseverance -- the uselessness of everything,
including even aesthetic effort, overshadows my consciousness & coöperates with
my native indolence in defeating all progressive or constructive developments.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 1 1927

As to futility & work -- I have come to the comfortably elderly condition of
not caring a rap whether I do anything or not!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 15 1927

I didn't want the mediaeval stuff, but the book was too good to tear in half.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, on the purchase of Goodyear's _Roman and Mediaeval
         Art_, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, November 1927

Sir, I refuse to fall into your adroit trap! I simply say -- with a delicate
wave of a perfectly manicured and correctly gloved hand -- that you are wrong
and I am right. Why? Because I say so! And that is all a gentleman can add to
the matter!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 13 1927

In a way, crosswords do harm by cluttering up the mind with an aimless heap of
unusual words selected purely for mechanical exigencies and having no
well-proportioned relation to the needs of graceful discourse.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to James F. Morton, November 17 1927

After walking for some distance, I encounter'd the rusty tracks of a
street-railway, & the worm-eaten poles which still held the limp & sagging
trolley wire. Following this line, I soon came upon a yellow, vestibuled car
numbered 1852 -- of a plain, double-trucked type common from 1900 to 1910. It
was untenanted, but evidently ready to start; the trolley being on the wire &
the air-brake pump now & then throbbing beneath the floor. I boarded it &
looked vainly about for the light switch -- noting as I did so the absence of
controller handle which implied the brief absence of the motorman. Then I sat
down in one of the cross seats toward the middle, awaiting the arrival of the
crew & the starting of the vehicle. Presently I heard a swishing in the sparse
grass toward the left, & saw the dark forms of two men looming up in the
moonlight. They had the regulation caps of a railway company, & I could not
doubt but that they were the conductor & motorman. Then one of them *sniffed*
with singular sharpness, & raised his face to howl to the moon. The other
dropped on all fours to run toward the car. I leaped up at once & raced madly
out of that car & away across endless leagues of plateau till exhaustion waked
me -- doing this not because the conductor had dropped on all fours, but
because the face of the motorman was a mere white cone tapeding to one
blood-red tentacle. ...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Donald Wandrei, November 24 1927,
         recounting a dream of the night before

In furnishing my Irish colleague with an account of my vivid and active career
I did not think it necessary to mention trifles so tame as Satanism and
neogonophagy -- nay, nor my voyage up the Oxus, nor my visit to Samarcand, nor
how *and why* I slew the yellow-veiled priest at Lhasa -- that priest whose
yellow silken veil stood out *too far* in front of where his face ought to be,
and moved in a manner that *I did not like*.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, December 1927

The Magnum Innominandum does not forget.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, December 1927

As for affectation -- I'm not fond of any kind, but hate literary affectation
the worst, because it is more permanent and subversive in its essence. We can
get rid of our personal affectations when we begin to see their absurdity, but
our literary affectations are embalmed in cold print, and have perhaps ruined
or at least vitiated what might have been our best work.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to August Derleth, early December 1927

This especial old bird, according to an anecdote recorded by George Sterling,
parted from Bierce under the dramatic circumstances of having a can broken over
his head! When I saw his fiction I wondered why Ambrosius didn't use a crowbar.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, describing Adolphus de Castro in a letter to
         Farnsworth Wright, December 22 1927

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Wilfred Blanch Talman, December 28
         1927

Yes -- nocturnal *howling* has an element of fearfulness for me. I always
associate it with lean, dog-faced beings that walk sometimes on two legs and
sometimes on four, and that lope abroad in the night's small hours.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, January 1928

As for the matter of drinking -- I have never tasted intoxicating liquor, and
never intend to; having a strong aesthetic disgust at anything which blunts or
coarsens the delicate natural equipoise of the evolved human intellect and
imagination.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, February 13 1928

I think drink is ugly, and therefore I have nothing to do with it.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Zealia Brown Reed, February 13 1928

Have you read _The Castle of Otranto_ itself? If not, *don't*! Let the summary
in Railo continue to give you a "kick", for the original certainly won't!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Bernard Austin Dwyer, February 14
         1928

Coleridge represented a fine balance betwixt mind and fancy, and I like him all
the better for not having an excess of sloppy emotion. The fact that his
experience came through books rather than life does not militate against him,
because he had the rare faculty of accepting the contents of books in an
abstract way, as if the material came directly from life with literary
filtration. Bookishness becomes tepid and artificial only when one looks *at*
the books instead of *through* them. So long as they are utilized only as
telescopes, and not worshipped for their mechanical selves, they form very
acceptable substitutes for vital experience.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, April 1928

Ingenuous Age once more essays to find / A proper Gift for Youth's sophistick
Mind, / Well tho' he know how bootless 'tis to send / Aught that his own old
Head can comprehend.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a gift to
         Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928

Of Wit and Beauty keeps discreetly chary, / And forfeits Sense to be
contemporary.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a gift to
         Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928

Devoid of Pomp as *Woolworth's* or *McCrory's*, / And cerebral as *Vogue* or
*Snappy-Stories*.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, accompanying a volume of Proust sent as a gift to
         Frank Belknap Long for Christmas 1928

What a man *does for pay* is of little significance. What he *is*, as a
sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 1929

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask
him about are his thoughts and dreams.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 1929

Here are we -- and yonder yawns the universe.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, February 20
         1929

Speaking of boredom -- why don't you try to accumulate a library which will
furnish you with a solid reserve of intellectual and aesthetic pabulum? The
expense -- unless you are particular about the appearance of the books -- is
truly next to nothing; for one can obtain astonishing bargains on the 10-cent
and 25-cent counters of second-hand book shops.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

I couldn't live a week without a private library -- indeed, I'd part with all
my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or
so books I possess.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

But the important thing to consider is the prodigious vitality of the Roman
idea. 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, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth
a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know
what he's talking about.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

I can dream a whole cycle of colonial life from merely gazing on a tattered old
book or almanack with the long 'f'.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture -- drugged and frenzied with the
hasheesh of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material
body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather
than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

All of my 38 1/2 years show in me, I guess; and so far as my temperament is
concerned, I was born an old man.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

However -- I am not quite such a solemn prig as you probably assume from my
letters.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Mr. Harris, February 25 to March 1
         1929

My fiction can't be compared with Poe's or Machen's, but I take no less
pleasure in writing it on that account.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929

The masters of art are not to 'bow down before', but to enjoy rationally & with
a proper appreciation.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929

Language, vocabulary, ideas, imagery -- everything succumbed to my one intense
purpose of thinking & dreaming myself back into that world of periwigs & long
s's which for some odd reason seemed to me the normal world.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929

Even when I break away, it is generally only through imitating something else!
There are my "Poe" pieces & my "Dunsany" pieces -- but alas -- where are my
*Lovecraft* pieces?
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8 1929

One thing I'll say for labour; & that is, that it isn't as offensive as the
corresponding mutatory force which now threatens culture in America. I refer to
the force of *business* as a dominating motive in life, & a persistent absorber
of the strongest creative energies of the American people.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, June 10 1929

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious
feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in
crime, perversion, and insanity.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4 1930

... 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 publick 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, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, 3 Nov 1930

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of
fascination...
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Frank Belknap Long, February 27
         1931

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into
an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for
truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With
such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to
receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact
that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game
by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in
my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Maurice W. Moe, August 3 1931

Despite my tremendous admiration for things like Dunsany's Gods of the Mountain
and O'Neill's Emperor Jones, I have never as yet employed drama as a medium of
expression. Probably the reason is that in the sort of work I am trying to do
human characters matter very little.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft, in a letter to Harold S. Farnese, September 22
         1932

To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts
the depressing revelations of truth.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left
dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at
any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer
unless he has tried writing at night.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
      -- H.P. Lovecraft