Lovecraft Quotes

“I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Outsider

“Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“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

“I like coffee exceedingly...”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“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

“All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre—

The Feast is over, and the lamps expire.”
― Robert E. Howard

“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.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

“The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Dagon et autres nouvelles de terreur

“That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons, even death may die. —H. P. Lovecraft”
― Stephen King, Revival

“How can this be real?” I whispered. “I mean you... you... where you come from. Your world. It is so beyond everything I've ever known. And you would... you would take me to the Pumpkin Ball?”

“Try and stop me.”
― Serra Elinsen, Awoken

“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

“Well did the traveler know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colors of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dingle. 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

“Terrible and ancient and scarred with the endless cold of space, the terrible and ancient things glistened with frozen moisture and colors played across the surface of the skin, colors that were never meant to be seen on earth.”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, Lovecraft Unbound

“Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops; but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant drowsy herbs.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

“By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he had entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under the enchanted sun.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

“This is Lovecraft's best terrible story. It is so artificial...and so overblown...and so ludicrous...that it slithers-through tiramisu-rich prose that might as well be heavy metal lyrics ("a wolf-fanged ghost that rode the midnight lightning")-all the way to the summit of high camp.”
― Kenneth Hite, Tour de Lovecraft - The Tales

“Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the marvelous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and, the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea tavern he found the captains and seamen he had known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais on a great green galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn, who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath

“I think that nothing is ’just’ fiction, as jokes are never ’just’ jokes and entertainment is never ’just’ entertainment. That’s not to say they can’t be entertaining or ridiculous, but all of them also address more serious topics in ways that might not be possible through ’serious’ communication.”
― Daniel Harms

“West of Arkham the hills rise wild
and there are valleys with deep woods that no ax has ever cut.
There are dark, narrow glens where the trees slope fantastically,
where thin brooklets trickle without ever having caught the glimpse of sunlight.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Colour Out of Space

“The dreams of men are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon, and this was fashioned in my dreams.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“The UFO abduction syndrom portrays, it seems to me, a banal Universe. The form of the supposed aliens is marked by a failure of the imagination and a preoccupation with human concerns. Not a single being presented in all these accounts is as astonishing as a cockatoo would be if you had never before beheld a bird.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The life of a painter demands solitude”
― Robert Bloch, The Creeper in the Crypt

“They who lose their Hold do so from their own Want of Strength; but desiring to conceal their Weakness, they attribute the Absence of Success to the first Critick that mentions them.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft : The Complete Fiction

“(...) uma rocha que se afastava da ilha. O dedo de Deus era apenas um de vários, enfileirados numa sequência correta demais para ser natural;”
― Luke Negreiros, No olho da Ilha

“Eu era estrangeiro numa terra única. Isolada de um continente que não exercia mais sua influência. Eu era o calço, o elo entre dois mundos e estava prestes a sentir o cheiro da morte para todos os lados que eu apontasse.”
― Luke Negreiros, No olho da Ilha

“What has clearly happened in the case of many otherwise intelligent people, is that childhood crippling of their brains and emotions in favor of some dogmatic religion has for all practical purposes made their theistic views impervious to logical analysis. It is an area they simply will not investigate objectively or impartially, because it has become so deeply fused with their entire self-image that it is beyond their psychological powers to question it. My own view is that this infantile brainwashing is one of the great crimes against humanity and it has been practiced for countless millennia (well before the advent of organized religion) and continues to be practiced to this day. Religious leaders would no doubt react with horror at the recommendation that children actually be allowed to make up their own minds about the adoption of a given religion, or any religion at all, until they are intellectually and emotionally ready to do so, without the prejudicial influence of parents, clerics, and the society at large. (No exception need be made for communist societies, for in such societies the people are brainwashed into atheism just as vigorously-and perniciously-as people in other societies are brainwashed into theism.) H. P. Lovecraft laid bare the matter long ago:

We all know that any emotional bias-irrespective of truth or falsity-can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value regarding the real "is-or-isn'tness" of things. Only the exceptional individual reared in the nineteenth century or before has any chance of holding any genuine opinion of value regarding the universe-except by a slow and painful process of courageous disillusionment. 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 honorable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasihypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.

”
― S.T. Joshi, God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong

“Under the caverned pyramids great Set coils asleep;
Among the shadows of the tombs his dusky people creep.
I speak the Word from the hidden gulfs that never knew the sun—
Send me a servant for my hate, oh scaled and shining One.”
― Robert E Howard

“You joke, but Lovecraft really was deathly afraid of all sea life,” Rudy was raving.
“Among other things, like music and black people,” Danny conceded.
Yu shivered, “Well they are evil.”
Ashleigh finally decided to jump on the conversation-wagon, “Octopus or Africans?”
“Like that, right there,” Rudy said as though whatever point he was trying to make had been proved. “We’re always applying moral attributes to actions and objects. We like to compartmentalize. We are a nation divided in so many ways. Politically, economically, geographically.”
“This coming from a guy who jerked off to an Eisenhower biography?” Yu said, almost as a non-sequitur if it weren’t true.
“I wasn’t reading it; it had just fallen open!”
Yu karate chopped him.”
― Kyle St Germain, Dysfunction

“I stared in stoned awe at a beast with a body made of books, the head of an alligator, and teeth of broken piano keys. I gawked at a giant baby doll climbing the Eiffel Tower with thousands of spindly naked people flying out of its mouth. The visual journey ended with a serpentine creature whose lamprey mouth coiled around the door’s border as hundreds of tiny tendrils extended from the mouth’s center. The tendrils reached toward the baby doll and alligator book creature and its piano key teeth, while other nightmare beasts danced at their feet and in the background.”
― Chase Griffin, How To Play A Necromancer's Theremin