Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

153. “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

154. “He enjoys life – as do all spared the curse of intelligence.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

155. “Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

156. “Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

157. “At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

158. “Chronophagos, the Devourer of Time, the Eater of Hours. What man remembereth even the hour of his death if the Chronophagos hath devoured it? – Nicephoros Attaliades, The Testament of Nightmares.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

159. “Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

160. “Heaven knows where I’ll end up – but it’s a safe bet that I’ll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

161. “If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

162. “Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

163. “Where does madness leave off and reality begin?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

164. “If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

165. “Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

166. “The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

167. “There will always be a small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

168. “It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

169. “When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect – designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

170. “I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

171. “For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

172. “Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don’t burn it.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

173. “It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

174. “Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

175. “It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

176. “In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

177. “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

178. “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

179. “All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

180. “To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

181. “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

182. “Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

183. “I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

184. “My favourite outdoor activity is going back inside.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

185. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

186. “The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

187. “I sometimes write stories.” “I sometimes read them.” “Thank you.” “Stories in general – not yours.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

188. “No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

189. “Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

190. “Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!”

— H.P. Lovecraft

191. “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

192. “I am a student of life, and don’t want to miss any experience. There’s poetry in this sort of thing, you know – or perhaps you don’t know, but it’s all the same.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

193. “I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best – one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

194. “There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

195. “Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

196. “The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

197. “I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

198. “Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

199. “You have been my friend in the cosmos; you have been my only friend on this planet – the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again – perhaps in the shining mists of Orion’s Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia. Perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight; perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

200. “And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.”

— H.P. Lovecraft