Top 450 H.P. Lovecraft Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Democracy is just a false idol – a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

402. “Beside the road at its crest a still higher summit rose, bleak and windswept, and I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

403. “Exham Priory itself I saw without emotion, a jumble of tottering mediaeval ruins covered with lichens and honeycombed with rooks’ nests, perched perilously upon a precipice, and denuded of floors or other interior features save the stone walls of the separate towers.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

404. “Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us, and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet’s scarce-cooled crust.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

405. “Ask of the Lesser, lest the Greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

406. “I have said that the fury of the rushing blast was infernal – cacodemoniacal – and that its voices were hideous with the pent-up viciousness of desolate eternities.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

407. “My slight fall had extinguished the lantern, but I produced an electric pocket lamp and viewed the small horizontal tunnel which led away indefinitely in both directions. It was amply large enough for a man to wriggle through; and though no sane person would have tried at that time, I forgot danger, reason, and cleanliness in my single-minded fever to unearth the lurking fear.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

408. “The moribund hermit’s rage and fear, swelling to grotesque proportions, seemed likely to shatter what remained of his failing physique; and once a spasm caused him to clap his hands to his eyes and rush into the bathroom. He groped his way out with face tightly bandaged, and I never saw his eyes again.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

409. “Everything was shadowy pantomime, as if seen at a vast distance through some intervening haze – although on the other hand the newcomer and all subsequent comers loomed large and close, as if both near and distant, according to some abnormal geometry.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

410. “Is it possible that even my latest fear is sheer delusion?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

411. “Sometimes when earth’s gods are homesick they visit in the still night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes. Men have felt the tears of the gods on white-capped Thurai, though they have thought it rain; and have heard the sighs of the gods in the plaintive dawn-winds...”

— H.P. Lovecraft

412. “Besides, he added, my constant talk about “unnamable” and “unmentionable” things was a very puerile device, quite in keeping with my lowly standing as an author. I was too fond of ending my stories with sights or sounds which paralysed my heroes’ faculties and left them without courage, words, or associations to tell what they had experienced.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

413. “It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

414. “Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

415. “Ninety aeons ago, before even the gods had danced upon its pointed peak, that mountain had spoken with fire and roared with the voices of the inner thunders. Now it towered all silent and sinister, bearing on the hidden side that secret titan image whereof rumour told. And there were caves in that mountain, which might be empty and alone with elder darkness, or might – if legend spoke truly – hold horrors of a form not to be surmised.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

416. “It was astonishing the number of useless things people found to do.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

417. “Numbers of men, or things which had been men, dropped to the floor and began lapping at the puddles of spilled liquor, but most remained immovable, watching the unprecedented actions of the barroom drudge and derelict.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

418. “Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

419. “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

420. “As the steps and the passage grew broader, I heard another sound, the thin, whining mockery of a feeble flute; and suddenly there spread out before me the boundless vista of an inner world–a vast fungous shore litten by a belching column of sick greenish flame and washed by a wide oily river that flowed from abysses frightful and unsuspected to join the blackest gulfs of immemorial ocean.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

421. “A crack formed and enlarged, and the whole door gave way – but from the other side; whence poured a howling tumult of ice-cold wind with all the stenches of the bottomless pit, and whence reached a sucking force not of earth or heaven, which, coiling sentiently about the paralysed detective, dragged him through the aperture and down unmeasured spaces filled with whispers and wails, and gusts of mocking laughter.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

422. “The trees budded prematurely around Nahum’s, and at night they swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum’s second son Thaddeus, a lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind; but even the gossips would not credit this.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

423. “And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

424. “The man was not a fantaisiste or romanticist at all – he did not even try to give us the churning, prismatic ephemera of dreams, but coldly and sardonically reflected some stable, mechanistic, and well-established horror-world which he saw fully, brilliantly, squarely, and unfalteringly.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

425. “Then in the slow creeping course of eternity the utmost cycle of the cosmos churned itself into another futile completion, and all things became again as they were unreckoned kalpas before. Matter and light were born anew as space once had known them; and comets, suns and worlds sprang flaming into life, though nothing survived to tell that they had been and gone, been and gone, always and always, back to no first beginning.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

426. “In cloud-ships the gods are wont to travel, and wise cotters have legends that keep them from certain high peaks at night when it is cloudy, for the gods are not lenient as of old.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

427. “Nature had played a hellish jest on them – as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste – and this was their tragic homecoming.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

428. “Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

429. “The man of Truth is beyond good and evil,” intoned a voice that was not a voice. “The man of Truth has ridden to All-Is-One. The man of Truth has learnt that Illusion is the only reality, and that substance is an impostor.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

430. “The Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

431. “My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration in the teeming labyrinths of ancient streets that twist endlessly from forgotten courts and squares and waterfronts to courts and squares and waterfronts equally forgotten, and in the Cyclopean modern towers and pinnacles that rise blackly Babylonian under waning moons, I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression which threatened to master, paralyse, and annihilate me.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

432. “All the objects – organic and inorganic alike – were totally beyond description or even comprehension. Gilman sometimes compared the inorganic masses to prisms, labyrinths, clusters of cubes and planes, and Cyclopean buildings; and the organic things struck him variously as groups of bubbles, octopi, centipedes, living Hindoo idols, and intricate Arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

433. “And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

434. “But for some reason or other Curwen did not care for society. Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane. There seemed to lurk in his bearing some cryptic, sardonic arrogance, as if he had come to find all human beings dull through having moved among stranger and more potent entities.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

435. “Allen was perhaps a similar case, and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

436. “Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

437. “In every wanderer there is a latent urge to return to the scenes of his childhood.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

438. “The fellow must be a relentless enemy of all mankind to take such glee in the torture of brain and flesh and the degradation of the mortal tenement.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

439. “He said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

440. “There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

441. “Was it too presumptuous to suppose that both the old legends and the recent reports had this much of reality behind them?”

— H.P. Lovecraft

442. “All he seeks from life is not to think. For some reason thought is very horrible to him, and anything which stirs the imagination he flees as a plague.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

443. “Kuranes had not lingered, but had plodded on as though summoned toward some goal. He dared not disobey the summons for fear it might prove an illusion like the urges and aspirations of waking life, which do not lead to any goal.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

444. “And straight in the rear were three of the mighty mountain shapes seen full against the southern stars, tiptoeing wolf-like and lumberingly, their tall mitres nodding thousands of feet in the air. The carven mountains, then, had not stayed squatting in that rigid semicircle north of Inganok with right hands uplifted. They had duties to perform, and were not remiss. But it was horrible that they never spoke, and never even made a sound in walking.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

445. “It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

446. “I knew that all sights and glories were at an end; for in that new realm was neither land nor sea, but only the white void of unpeopled and illimitable space. So, happier than I had ever dared hope to be, I dissolved again into that native infinity of crystal oblivion from which the daemon Life had called me for one brief and desolate hour.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

447. “His frightened horse had gone home, but his frightened wits never quite did that.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

448. “Furtiveness and secretiveness seemed universal in this hushed city of alienage and death, and I could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

449. “The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, and Kuranes wondered whether the peaked roofs of the small houses hid sleep or death.”

— H.P. Lovecraft

450. “It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music.”

— H.P. Lovecraft