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

About the author

Popular quotes

“We always see the worst in our selves. Our most volnerable selves. We need someone to get close enough to tell us that we're wrong. Someone we trust.”
― Rachel Cohn, quote from Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

“Unlike the Marines, who are given macho monikers like “jarheads,” the Coast Guard had long been denigrated in military circles as fey “puddle jumpers.” But just as 9/11 brought a newfound respect to firemen, Katrina did the same for the reputation of the Coast Guard. At the peak of rescue operations they had 62 aircraft, 30 cutters, and 111 small boats stepping up in rescue and recovery operations. They did it all one person at a time.”
― Douglas Brinkley, quote from The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

“guess what flows more clearly than words is your intention and your spirit. You really don’t need words to convince; your intention and your presence is enough. Words are cheap but what people really buy is your intention, which reveals itself whether you know it or not. There is a listening beyond words and that is the call of the spirit.”
― Priya Kumar, quote from I Am Another You: A Journey to Powerful Breakthroughs

“if i had to choose between breathing or loving you, i would say 'i love you' with my last breath”
― Shannon Dermott, quote from Waiting for Mercy

“Fiona had never learned her mother's language and she had never shown much respect for the stories that it preserved-the stories that Grant had taught and written about, and still did write about, in his working life. She referred to their heroes as "old Njal" or "old Snorri." But in the last few years she had developed an interest in the country itself and looked at travel guides. She read about William Morris's trip, and Auden's. She didn't really plan to travel there. She said the weather was too dreadful. Also-she said-there ought to be one place you thought about and knew about and maybe longed for-but never did get to see.”
― Alice Munro, quote from Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.