Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 8

201. “As I did so I became suddenly and agonizingly aware of the nearness of the carrion thing, whose hideous hollow breathing I half fancied I could hear. Nearly mad, I found myself yet able to throw out a hand to ward off the foetid apparition which pressed so close; when in one cataclysmic second of cosmic nightmarishness and hellish accident my fingers touched the rotting outstretched paw of the monster beneath the golden arch.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

202. “There are my ‘Poe’ pieces and my ‘Dunsany pieces’ – but alas – where are any Lovecraft pieces?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

203. “Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last – what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn – whatever they had been, they were men!”

— H.P. Lovecraft

204. “And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth’s bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

205. “It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked always there. 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, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

206. “From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

207. “Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

208. “I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

209. “Once I sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God; but soon perceiving that he was hopelessly conventional, I did not press my inquiries.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

210. “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

211. “Ye have done much to bring about the indescribable return. May ye go mad quickly and not be devoured.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

212. “My searchlight expired, but still I ran. I heard voices, and yowls, and echoes, but above all there gently rose that impious, insidious scurrying, gently rising, rising as a stiff bloated corpse gently rises above an oily river that flows under endless onyx bridges to a black putrid sea. Something bumped into me – something soft and plump. It must have been the rats; the viscous, gelatinous, ravenous army that feast on the dead and the living...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

213. “Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing – too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

214. “Even the Terrible Old Man who talks to leaden pendulums in bottles, buys groceries with centuried Spanish gold, and keeps stone idols in the yard of his antediluvian cottage in Water Street can only say these things were the same when his grandfather was a boy, and that must have been inconceivable ages ago, when Belcher or Shirley or Pownall or Bernard was Governor of His Majesty’s Province of the Massachusetts-Bay.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

215. “Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse’s men as they ploughed on through the black morass toward the red glare and the muffled tom-toms. There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

216. “Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

217. “The blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

218. “It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly in the darkness to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

219. “It was in mid-summer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

220. “On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage – the first I had ever seen – in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

221. “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

222. “The more he withdrew from the world around him, the more wonderful became his dreams.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

223. “Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity. There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

224. “Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me – to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

225. “Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

226. “It was a scene from a vision of Fuseli, and over all the rest reigned that riot of luminous amorphousness, that alien and undimensioned rainbow of cryptic poison from the well – seething, feeling, lapping, reaching, scintillating, straining, and malignly bubbling in its cosmic and unrecognisable chromaticism.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

227. “These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

228. “With hidden powers of unknown extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

229. “Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality. In our sensible age – since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town’s and the world’s welfare at heart – people shun it without knowing exactly why.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

230. “Despite his Falstaffian appearance he was a hard and ruthless man. His piggish eyes were filled with greed; his fleshy mouth was lustful; his only natural smile was one of avarice.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

231. “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

232. “The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect successions of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

233. “I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

234. “Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

235. “I cannot even hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable. It was the ghoulish shade of decay, antiquity, and dissolution; the putrid, dripping eidolon of unwholesome revelation, the awful baring of that which the merciful earth should always hide.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

236. “There are vocal qualities peculiar to men, and vocal qualities peculiar to beasts; and it is terrible to hear the one when the source should yield the other.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

237. “One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there – a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

238. “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

239. “As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of the ocean.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

240. “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.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

241. “And behind it all I saw the ineffable malignity of primordial necromancy, black and amorphous, and fumbling greedily after me in the darkness to choke out the spirit that had dared to mock it by emulation.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

242. “For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

243. “The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams; and it would have been quite futile to try to describe them on paper.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

244. “It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train – a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

245. “It is not unusual for the central menace of a work of horror fiction to be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

246. “Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

247. “Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience – but when one unmistakably isn’t such an artist, there’s no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

248. “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

249. “Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

250. “Could it be that the dream-soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dulness could not utter?”

— H.P. Lovecraft