H. P. Lovecraft Quotes :
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Indeed, there is much in pure humanitarian culture, as opposed to rigid scientific training, which encourages absorption in the affairs of mankind, and more or less indifference to the unfathomed abysses of star-strown space that yawn interminably about this terrestrial grain of dust.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Nothing is really typical of my efforts… I’m simply casting about for better ways to crystallise and capture certain strong impressions (involving the elements of time, the unknown, cause and effect, fear, scenic and architectural beauty, and other seemingly ill-assorted things) which persist in clamouring for expression.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The earliest English attempts at rhyming probably included words whose agreement is so slight that it deserves the name of mere ‘assonance’ rather than that of actual rhyme.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
We must realise that man’s nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
We should perceive that man’s period of historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to allow of any considerable mental change.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Man’s respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training, it can be elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long – then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality – the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and shambles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
We call ourselves a dog’s ‘master’ – but who ever dared to call himself the ‘master’ of a cat? We own a dog – he is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we entertain a cat – he adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because he wishes to be there.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise, but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such an one more agreeable and interesting.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic – nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly ungraceful – a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
For correct writing, the cultivation of patience and mental accuracy is essential. Throughout the young author’s period of apprenticeship, he must keep reliable dictionaries and textbooks at his elbow; eschewing as far as possible that hasty extemporaneous manner of writing which is the privilege of more advanced students.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The end of a story must be stronger rather than weaker than the beginning, since it is the end which contains the denouement or culmination and which will leave the strongest impression upon the reader.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous – that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn’t.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Adulthood is hell.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I do not think that any realism is beautiful.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I am well-nigh resolv’d to write no more tales but merely to dream when I have a mind to, not stopping to do anything so vulgar as to set down the dream for a boarish Publick.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider’d but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg’d in with infrequency and Discrimination.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.
H. P. LOVECRAFT