TIW > TIW's Quotes

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

“There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Thing on the Doorstep

“I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“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

“All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Silver Key

“As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Night Ocean et autres nouvelles

“No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”
― H. P. Lovecraft, Necronomicon: The Best Weird Tales

“The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror and Others

“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.”
― H. P. Lovercraft

“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.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Rats in the Walls

“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

“I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, From Beyond

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. 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, The Call of Cthulhu

“The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters III: 1929-1931

“Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises...”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

“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, The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft

“All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”
― H. P. Lovecraft

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.”
― Howard Phillips Lovecraft

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Tales of H.P. Lovecraft