Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Between the phantasms of nightmare and the realities of the objective world a monstrous and unthinkable relationship was crystallising, and only stupendous vigilance could avert still more direful developments.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

252. “In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

253. “Was tempted to quote Walden – “Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?” – but refrained. How can I get lonely, I asked, when there’s still so much to read?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

254. “For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He is the soul of antique Aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in Meroe and Ophir. He.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

255. “Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon – but of these things I must not now speak.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

256. “They said it had been there before D’Iberville, before La Salle, before the Indians, and before even the wholesome beasts and birds of the woods.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

257. “Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

258. “What we did see – for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned – was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”;.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

259. “We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

260. “You drug me, and then ask me to walk! Frank, you’re as unreasonable as an artist.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

261. “This man bore no resemblance to the bearded, grizzled Akeley of the snapshot; but was a younger and more urban person, fashionably dressed, and wearing only a small, dark moustache.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

262. “Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches... men should not have the heads of crocodiles...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

263. “The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

264. “Again there was silence – a silence as of consummated Evil brooding above its unnamable triumph.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

265. “This time I did not have to question the source of his snarls and hisses, and of the fear which made him sink his claws into my ankle, unconscious of their effect; for on every side of the chamber the walls were alive with nauseous sound – the verminous slithering of ravenous, gigantic rats.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

266. “For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance – or identity – were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

267. “There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

268. “There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

269. “Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that the lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

270. “I have frequently wondered if the majority of mankind ever pause to reflect upon the occasionally titanic significance of dreams, and of the obscure world to which they belong.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

271. “Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

272. “He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

273. “Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

274. “Now that he is gone and the spell is broken, the actual fear is greater. Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

275. “Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale, St. John and I had followed enthusiastically every aesthetic and intellectual movement which promised respite from our devastating ennui.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

276. “All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

277. “Think not that delight and understanding dwell just across the Karthian hills, or in any spot thou canst find in a day’s, or a year’s, or a lustrum’s journey.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

278. “Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

279. “The square-paned windows were coated with a thick, dewlike moisture;.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

280. “Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

281. “For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

282. “There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

283. “I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

284. “The waves from that thing are waking a thousand sleeping senses in us; senses which we inherit from aeons of evolution from the state of detached electrons to the state of organic humanity.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

285. “He led me out of that tangle of alleys in another direction, it seems, for when we sighted a lamp-post we were in a half-familiar street with monotonous rows of mingled tenement blocks and old houses. Charter Street, it turned out to be, but I was too flustered to notice just where we hit.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

286. “To visit Yuggoth would drive any weak man mad – yet I am going there. The black rivers of pitch that flow under those mysterious Cyclopean bridges – things built by some elder race extinct and forgotten before the things came to Yuggoth from the ultimate voids – ought to be enough to make any man a Dante or Poe if he can keep sane long enough to tell what he has seen.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

287. “Ihre Hand ist an eurer Kehle, doch seht ihr Sie nicht.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

288. “I passed under an arch out of that region of slabs and columns, and wandered through the open country; sometimes following the visible road, but sometimes leaving it curiously to tread across meadows where only occasional ruins bespoke the ancient presence of a forgotten road.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

289. “To hint to unimaginative people of a horror beyond all human conception – a horror of houses and blocks and cities leprous and cancerous with evil dragged from elder worlds – would be merely to invite a padded cell instead of restful rustication, and Malone was a man of sense despite his mysticism.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

290. “Man’s respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training it can be elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

291. “We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn’t much.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

292. “All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

293. “The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

294. “Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

295. “Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

296. “All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

297. “Reasonable readers would have accepted my book about ghouls as a work of fiction, but such readers are rare, and most condemned it as a hoax. Even worse, totally unreasonable readers took it for a scientific treatise.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

298. “Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

299. “The priest was dead. Nevertheless, he sat at table with us as we feasted on cold meats.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

300. “Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right – but suppose they weren’t?”

— H.P. Lovecraft