Top 380 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

352. “Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

353. “My youngest boy went mad. He sits drooling on the porch, trying to play the cat like an accordion. He’s been scratched some.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

354. “For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills – and that those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

355. “I now saw plainly that this foul emanation could have no admixture or connection whatsoever with the clean air of the Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower down.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

356. “It isn’t so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it’s centuries away as the soul goes.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

357. “I said, “I try to open my mail at least once a year, but sometimes I neglect it.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

358. “This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

359. “There was a hideous fall through incalculable leagues of viscous, sentient darkness, and a babel of noises utterly alien to all that we know of the earth and its organic life.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

360. “Ulrich the Axe, famed for his bloody deeds among Christians and pagans alike.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

361. “It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

362. “I recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

363. “The strange things of the past which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness. But.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

364. “So talked a while with Sarr about his cats – the usual subject of conversation, especially because, now that summer’s coming, they’re bringing in dead things every night. Field mice, moles, shrews, birds, even a little garter snake. They don’t eat them, just lay them out on the porch for the Poroths to see – sort of an offering, I guess.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

365. “I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

366. “There was a formula – a sort of list of things to say and do – which I recognised as something black and forbidden; something which I had read of before in furtive paragraphs of mixed abhorrence and fascination penned by those strange ancient delvers into the universe’s guarded secrets whose decaying texts I loved to absorb.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

367. “There was a study called ‘Subway Accident,’ in which a flock of the vile things were clambering up from some unknown catacomb through a crack in the floor of the Boston Street subway and attacking a crowd of people on the platform. Another showed a dance on Copp’s Hill among the tombs with the background of today.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

368. “Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

369. “At a guess I’ll guarantee to lead you to thirty or forty alleys and networks of alleys north of Prince Street that aren’t suspected by ten living beings outside of the foreigners that swarm them.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

370. “It wearied Carter to see how solemnly people tried to make earthly reality out of old myths which every step of their boasted science confuted.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

371. “Everything he saw was unspeakably menacing and horrible; and whenever one of the organic entities appeared by its motions to be noticing him, he felt a stark, hideous fright which generally jolted him awake.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

372. “St. John is a mangled corpse; I alone know why, and such is my knowledge that I am about to blow out my brains for fear I shall be mangled in the same way. Down unlit and illimitable corridors of eldritch phantasy sweeps the black, shapeless Nemesis that drives me to self-annihilation.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

373. “My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

374. “At the present time he was a man of perhaps forty-five years of age, short and heavy-set, with a bullet-shaped head that rested on broad, ape-like shoulders. His thick torso and bulging paunch were supported by a pair of spindly legs that contrasted oddly with the upper portions of his beefy body.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

375. “We were too late for the elevated, and walked back downtown through Hanover Street. I remember that wall. We switched from Tremont up Beacon, and Pickman left me at the corner of Joy, where I turned off. I never spoke to him again.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

376. “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. A time will come-but I must not and cannot think! Let me pray that, if I do survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

377. “Providence – that universal haven of the odd, the free, and the dissenting.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

378. “Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

379. “But I do not fear him now, for I suspect that he has known horrors beyond my ken. Now I fear for him.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

380. “They’s allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich – livin’ things – as ain’t human an’ ain’t good fer human folks.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

381. “I think Professor Angell died because he knew too much, or because he was likely to learn too much. Whether I shall go as he did remains to be seen, for I have learned much now.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

382. “I felt, in brief agonies of disillusionment, the gigantic blackness of this overwhelming universe, in which my days and the days of my race were as nothing to the shattered stars; a universe in which each action is vain and even the emotion of grief a wasted thing.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

383. “A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

384. “I knew not which to believe, yet longed more and more to cross forever into the unknown land; for doubt and secrecy are the lure of lures, and no new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

385. “What I had thought morbid and shameful and ignominious is in reality awesome and mind-expanding and even glorious – my previous estimate being merely a phase of man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

386. “But as always in my strange and roving existence, wonder soon drove out fear; for the luminous abyss and what it might contain presented a problem worthy of the greatest explorer.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

387. “Far from the shore stands the grey lighthouse, above sunken slimy rocks that are seen when the tide is low, but unseen when the tide is high. Past that beacon for a century have swept the majestic barques of the seven seas. In the days of my grandfather there were many; in the days of my father not so many; and now there are so few that I sometimes feel strangely alone, as though I were the last man on our planet.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

388. “If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last – even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

389. “It was a key – a guide – to certain gateways and transitions of which mystics have dreamed and whispered since the race was young, and which lead to freedoms and discoveries beyond the three dimensions and realms of life and matter that we know.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

390. “Now, as the baying of that dead, fleshless monstrosity grows louder and louder, and the stealthy whirring and flapping of those accursed web-wings circles closer and closer, I shall seek with my revolver the oblivion which is my only refuge from the unnamed and unnamable.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

391. “I said to myself, with all the ardour of a sculptor, that this man was a faun’s statue out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple’s ruins and brought somehow to life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating years.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

392. “He told me to set my watch back an hour, since the northern hill country will have no dealings with new-fangled daylight time schemes. As I did so it seemed to me that I was likewise turning the calendar back a century.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

393. “Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality – the qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic, dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

394. “Into his mind floated pictures of alien orbs with great stone towers, and other orbs with titan mountains and no mark of life, and still remoter spaces where only a stirring in vague blackness told of the presence of consciousness and will.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

395. “I made it last night in a dream of strange cities;.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

396. “Well, I should say that the really weird artist has a kind of vision which makes models, or summons up what amounts to actual scenes from the spectral world he lives in.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

397. “As if beckoned by those who had gone before, I half floated between the titanic snowdrifts, quivering and afraid, into the sightless vortex of the unimaginable.”

— H.P. Lovecraft