Quotes from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone;”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“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, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“There was a formula—a sort of list of things to say and do—which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe’s guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“the while shouting his determination to reach some ‘big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor, and the loud queer music far away’. As two men of moderate size sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain ‘thing that shines and shakes and laughs’.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Peck Valley would have shuddered a bit had it known the easy ethics of its mortuary artist in such debatable matters as the ownership of costly “laying-out” apparel invisible beneath the casket’s lid, and the degree of dignity to be maintained in posing and adapting the unseen members of lifeless tenants to containers not always calculated with sublimest accuracy. Most distinctly Birch was lax, insensitive, and professionally undesirable;”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature,”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“At last the spring thaw came, and graves were laboriously prepared for the nine silent harvests of the grim reaper which waited in the tomb.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“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.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Old Castro remembered bits of hideous legend that paled the speculations of theosophists and made man and the world seem recent and transient indeed.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“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 listen 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, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth’s globe.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, quote from The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

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“When all’s said and done they’re a strange breed, these South and East Londoners, and they’re amused by little things. Their love of jellied eels and pie ‘n’ mash is astonishing. “Food of the Gods,” they call it, as they enter some filthy hovel to order pie ‘n’ mash, without even knowing what they’re eating. I’ve asked what meat it is and been told, “Meat? Its pie, pie ‘n’ mash with liquor. Food of the Gods.”
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“Really!” said the fat lady to Jane and Katharine and Martha, who were wedged tightly against her. “Stop shoving.” “I’m sorry, but we haven’t time for you now,” said Jane to the fat lady. And she wished her twice as far as where she belonged. The lady was quite annoyed to find herself suddenly at home in her own kitchen, and later sued the newspaper for witchcraft. But she was never able to prove her case, and anyway that does not come into this story. Back in her office, the children’s mother sat staring palely at the place where the lady had been.”
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