Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
"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.
"The Music of Erich Zann"
Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"Herbert West--Reanimator"
Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all -- the horde was grotesquely heterogeneous.
"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.
"Herbert West--Reanimator"
Men of learning suspect it little, and ignore it mostly.
"Hypnos"
Among the agonies of these after days is that chief of torments -- inarticulateness.
"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 ...
"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.
"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...
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.
"The Hound"
History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"The Unnamable"
I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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."
"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.
"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.
"The Rats in the Walls"
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
"The Rats in the Walls"
Prying curiosity means death.
"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.
"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.
"Under the Pyramids"
But I survived, and I know it was only a dream.
"Under the Pyramids"
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"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.
"The Horror at Red Hook"