Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

304. “Who knows the end? What.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

305. “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

306. “When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods. Once when the wind was soft and scented I heard the south calling, and sailed endlessly and languorously under strange stars.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

307. “My ears rang and my imagination seethed as I led my camel slowly across the sand to that unvocal place; that place which I alone of living men had seen. In.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

308. “From what black wells of Acherontic fear or feeling, from what unplumbed gulfs of extra-cosmic consciousness or obscure, long-latent heredity, were those half-articulate thunder-croakings drawn?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

309. “It is enough to say that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not to open fields and groves but on to a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

310. “I can still see Herbert West under the sinister electric light as he injected his reanimating solution into the arm of the headless body. The scene I cannot describe – I should faint if I tried it, for there is madness in a room full of classified charnel things, with blood and lesser human debris almost ankle-deep on the slimy floor, and with hideous reptilian abnormalities sprouting, bubbling, and baking over a winking bluish-green spectre of dim flame in a far corner of black shadows. The.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

311. “These are the nameless larvae of the Other Gods, and like them are blind and without mind, and possessed of singular hungers and thirsts.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

312. “Why, Sir,” reply’d Johnson, “I do not require to become familiar with a Man’s Writings in order to estimate the Superficiality of his Attainments, when he plainly shews it by his Eagerness to mention his own Productions in the first Question he puts to me.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

313. “It is absurd to say that mathematicians have not discovered the fourth dimension.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

314. “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

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

316. “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

317. “Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye may toil more, when shall happiness find you?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

319. “It is hard to explain just how a single sight of a tangible object with measurable dimensions could so shake and change a man; and we may only say that there is about certain outlines and entities a power of symbolism and suggestion which acts frightfully on a sensitive thinker’s perspective and whispers terrible hints of obscure cosmic relationships and unnamable realities behind the protective illusions of common vision.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

320. “You needn’t think I’m crazy, Eliot – plenty of others have queerer prejudices than this. Why don’t you laugh at Oliver’s grandfather, who won’t ride in a motor? If I don’t like that damned subway, it’s my own business; and we got here more quickly anyhow in the taxi. We’d have had to walk up the hill from Park Street if we’d taken the car.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

321. “But did it ever occur to you, my friend, that force and matter are merely the barriers to perception imposed by time and space?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

322. “It is a decade now since he moved into Gray’s Inn, and of where he had been he would say nothing till the night young Williams bought the Necronomicon.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

323. “Carter did not wish to meet a bhole, so.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

324. “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

325. “These little debates are known as “flamewars.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

326. “Only a cynic can create horror – for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

327. “What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

328. “Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

329. “The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

330. “When you can hear a spider walk across the floor, you know it’s time to keep your socks on. Thank God for insecticide.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

331. “Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

332. “They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

333. “Still, it’s a nice, cynical book for those who like atrocity scenes – starving prisoners forced to eat their girlfriends, etc.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

334. “Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

335. “Common sense” in reflecting on these subjects, I assured my friend with some warmth, is merely a stupid absence of imagination and mental flexibility.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

336. “Then suddenly I saw it. With only a slight churning to mark its rise to the surface, the thing slid into view above the dark waters. Vast, Polyphemus-like, and loathsome, it darted like a stupendous monster of nightmares to the monolith, about which it flung its gigantic scaly arms, the while it bowed its hideous head and gave vent to certain measured sounds. I think I went mad then.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

337. “He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

338. “There is, I reflected tritely, an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person who has come down in the world.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

339. “The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox’s seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

340. “It was dismal sitting there on rickety boxes in the pitchy darkness, but we smoked pipes and occasionally flashed our pocket lamps about.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

341. “Look here, do you know the whole North End once had a set of tunnels that kept certain people in touch with each other’s houses, and the burying ground, and the sea?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

342. “I could tell I was at the gateway of a region half-bewitched through the piling-up of unbroken time-accumulations; a region where old, strange things have had a chance to grow and linger because they have never been stirred up.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

343. “You cannot oppose what you cannot see or feel. You cannot oppose the thousand-dimensional. Suppose they should eat their way to us through space!”

— H.P. Lovecraft

344. “Many would have disliked to live, if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and a scholar and had not minded.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

345. “His chief delights were of a less public and philanthropic kind, requiring many explanations of sounds which seemed peculiar even amidst that babel of the damned. Among these sounds were frequent revolver-shots – surely not uncommon on a battlefield, but distinctly uncommon in an hospital. Dr. West’s reanimated specimens were not meant for long existence or a large audience.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

346. “It had been so long abandoned that the rats scurrying on their errands spared me no more than occasional glances of annoyance.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

347. “Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth’s globe.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

348. “In youth he had felt the hidden beauty and ecstasy of things, and had been a poet; but poverty and sorrow and exile had turned his gaze in darker directions, and he had thrilled at the imputations of evil in the world around.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

349. “Nothing has been distorted or concealed, and if anything remains vague, it is only because of the dark cloud which has come over my mind – that cloud and the nebulous nature of the horrors which brought it upon me.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

350. “I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin;.”

— H.P. Lovecraft