TERMS STARTING WITH
TERMS ANYWHERE
KEYS (10k)
16 H P Lovecraft
1 Gary Gygax
1 encompass'd d quiet never echoes to a sound.
As I walk
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
1013 H P Lovecraft
1:Never Explain Anything ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
2:I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
3:That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons death may die.
~ H P Lovecraft,#KEYS
4:And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
5:And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
6:The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
~ H P Lovecraft,#KEYS
7:And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
8:I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
9:Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
10:The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H P Lovecraft, and A. Merritt. ~ Gary Gygax, Writing in Appendix N, AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (1979), p. 224, #KEYS
11:A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
12: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, #KEYS
13: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, #KEYS
14:After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question: "Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars - was it like that?"
And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected "No - it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere - a gelatin - a slime yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes - and a blemish. It was the pit - the maelstrom - the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable! ~ H P Lovecraft, The Unnamable,#KEYS
15:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
~ H P Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu,#KEYS
16:And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea. Upon ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
17:A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. ~ H P Lovecraft, #KEYS
18:The Garden ::: There's an ancient, ancient garden that I see sometimes in dreams,
Where the very Maytime sunlight plays and glows with spectral gleams;
Where the gaudy-tinted blossoms seem to wither into grey,
And the crumbling walls and pillars waken thoughts of yesterday.
There are vines in nooks and crannies, and there's moss about the pool,
And the tangled weedy thicket chokes the arbour dark and cool:
In the silent sunken pathways springs a herbage sparse and spare,
Where the musty scent of dead things dulls the fragrance of the air.
There is not a living creature in the lonely space arouna,
And the hedge~encompass'd d quiet never echoes to a sound.
As I walk, and wait, and listen, I will often seek to find
When it was I knew that garden in an age long left behind;
I will oft conjure a vision of a day that is no more,
As I gaze upon the grey, grey scenes I feel I knew before.
Then a sadness settles o'er me, and a tremor seems to start -
For I know the flow'rs are shrivell'd hopes - the garden is my heart. ~ H P Lovecraft,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:Never Explain Anything ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
2:Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
3:Never Explain Anything ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
4:Who knows the end? What ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
5:Life is a hideous thing. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
6:The Whisperer in Darkness ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
7:I like coffee exceedingly. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
8:and mentally aberrant type. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
9:I like coffee exceedingly... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
10:A mountain walked or stumbled. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
11:incurable lover of the grotesque ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
12:bhole whose form no man might see. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
13:Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
14:Carter did not wish to meet a bhole, so ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
15:Her laughter was like sweet deadly venom. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
16:Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
17:thirst had driven him into the desert again, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
18:Do not call up any that you can not put down. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
19:These little debates are known as “flamewars. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
20:Do not call up that which you cannot put down. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
21:function—thoughtless, careless, and liquorish, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
22:Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
23:En épocas extrañas hasta la muerte puede morir. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
24:Where does madness leave off and reality begin? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
25:The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
26:...el encaprichamiento se crece con las críticas. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
27:nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space—their ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
28:Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
29:In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
30:Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
31:we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
32:In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
33:My favourite outdoor activity is going back inside. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
34:Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
35:all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
36:and the grey turned to roseal light edged with gold. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
37:The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
38:Ihre Hand ist an eurer Kehle, doch seht ihr Sie nicht. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
39:Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
40:The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
41:Los sabios interpretan los sueños, y los dioses se ríen. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
42:Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
43:From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
44:Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Then ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
45:Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
46:Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
47:the trees would die before the poison was out of the soil. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
48:When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
49:I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
50:...la satisfacción de un momento es la ruina del siguiente. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
51:My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
52:that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
53:The greatest human achievements have never been for profit. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
54:Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
55:Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
56:He enjoys life - as do all spared the curse of intelligence. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
57:I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
58:I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
59:Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
60:Who are we to combat poisons older than history and mankind? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
61:Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
62:Death would be a boon if only it could blot out the memories. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
63:he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
64:Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
65:Nothing really known, can continue to be acutely fascinating. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
66:We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
67:From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
68:shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
69:we are all roamers of vast spaces and travellers in many ages. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
70:The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
71:In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
72:Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
73:The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
74:(...) Vinieron de las estrellas y trajeron consigo sus imágenes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
75:A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
76:God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
77:I think drink is ugly, and therefore I have nothing to do with it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
78:Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
79:Rara vez deja de haber ironía incluso en el mayor de los horrores. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
80:Fear best lends itself to the creation of Nature-defying illusions. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
81:you could see one near Henchman Street from the elevated last year. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
82:The square-paned windows were coated with a thick, dewlike moisture; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
83:I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
84:The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
85:the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
86:All the birds had flown away, save only the great, grotesque penguins. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
87:Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
88:my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
89:Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
90:When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
91:Eine Stimme aus anderen Zeiten gehört in einen Friedhof anderer Zeiten. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
92:the growing boy whose own mother inculcated a belief in his “ugliness”; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
93:Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
94:His drinking, of course, only aggravated what it was meant to alleviate. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
95:Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
96:Good God! What eldritch dream-world was this into which he had blundered? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
97:It is no news to me that tales of hidden races are as old as all mankind. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
98:Der Wind rauscht mit Ihren Stimmen, und die Erde grollt durch Ihren Geist. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
99:It is more important to know what to hate than it is to know what to love. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
100:All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
101:Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
102:sie hieß mich mit einer Warmherzigkeit willkommen, die geradezu hämisch war. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
103:Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
104:Evrende acı olduğu kadar merhemi de vardır ve bu merhem unutuştur. - Sayfa 28 ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
105:No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
106:Ulrich the Axe, famed for his bloody deeds among Christians and pagans alike. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
107:better to meet a ghoul, which one can see, than a bhole, which one cannot see. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
108:But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
109:Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
110:He who passes the gates always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
111:man’s eternal tendency to hate and fear and shrink from the utterly different. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
112:resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
113:Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
114:veritable gateway to realms of unfathomed horror and inconceivable abnormality. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
115:Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
116:Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
117:I said, “I try to open my mail at least once a year, but sometimes I neglect it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
118:its face had taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck before. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
119:Sounds—possibly musical—heard in the night from other worlds or realms of being. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
120:He who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
121:His frightened horse had gone home, but his frightened wits never quite did that. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
122:It is absurd to say that mathematicians have not discovered the fourth dimension. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
123:I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
124:Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
125:You drug me, and then ask me to walk! Frank, you’re as unreasonable as an artist. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
126:All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
127:That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
128:That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons death may die.
~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
129:For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
130:So erweckte er eher den Eindruck harmloser Unbeholfenheit, als attraktiv zu wirken. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
131:despising the world as if they had access to other and preferable spheres of entity. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
132:It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
133:O quanto mais se afastava do mundo ao redor, mais exuberantes tornavam-se os sonhos; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
134:when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
135:For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
136:For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
137:I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
138:That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
139:The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
140:for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realize. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
141:I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
142:In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
143:I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
144:The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
145:tradition emphasises the uselessness of material barriers in halting a witch's notions ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
146:For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone. I ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
147:Il gatto è misterioso e affine alle cose invisibili che l'uomo non potrà mai conoscere; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
148:The priest was dead. Nevertheless, he sat at table with us as we feasted on cold meats. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
149:Non è morto ciò che può vivere in eterno,
E in strani eoni anche la morte può morire. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
150:That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.” Only ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
151:I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
152:In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,
But all the sadder tums, the more he knows! ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
153:Clearly, some cryptic, evil movement was afoot on a large scale—just what, I could not say. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
154:I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
155:Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
156:As at all crises of his strange life, sheer cosmic curiosity triumphed over everything else. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
157:Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
158:By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
159:it was hard to leave a place where all one’s memories and ancestral feelings centred. Before ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
160:Me sentí como en el fin del mundo, atisbando al borde de un caos insondable de noche eterna. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
161:he climbed desperately to escape the unendurable nuzzling of that loathsome and overfed bhole ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
162:I don’t believe that there is any fourth dimension, and I emphatically do not believe in Tao. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
163:I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
164:Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
165:Sie verachteten die Welt, als hätten sie Zugang zu anderen und vorzüglicheren Daseinssphären. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
166:So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
167:...und der ganze Erdball würde durch eine Fackel aus Ekstase und Freiheit in Flammen gesetzt. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
168:Vorsicht ist die erste Sorge jener, die gelegentliche Scharlatanerie und Betrug gewöhnt sind. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
169:Again there was silence—a silence as of consummated Evil brooding above its unnamable triumph. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
170:Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
171:But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
172:En medio del desolado paraje, incluso el tétrico bosque de más allá parecía un hogar acogedor. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
173:I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
174:the rats inevitably dragged away the whole cadaver through the hole they gnawed in the coffin. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
175:The village seemed very old, eaten away at the edge like the moon which had commenced to wane, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
176:I bade my host adieu and took a train for San Francisco. In less than a month I was in Dunedin; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
177:Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
178:My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
179:They were large, even for the mus decumanus, which sometimes measures fifteen inches in length, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
180:Ever new seemed this deathless city of vision, for here time has no power to tarnish or destroy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
181:I sometimes write stories." "I sometimes read them." "Thank you." "Stories in general—not yours. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
182:Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
183:this very morning, an hour agone, he has mounted his white ass for the return journey to Vyones. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
184:Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
185:we all come from onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn— ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
186:I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
187:It isn’t so very far from the elevated as distance goes, but it’s centuries away as the soul goes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
188:«Que no está muerto lo que yace eternamente y con el paso de los evos, aun la muerte puede morir» ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
189:This place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
190:despaired of any rest or contentment in a world grown too busy for beauty and too shrewd for dreams ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
191:I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
192:It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
193:It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
194:Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . . ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
195:Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
196:West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
197:As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
198:Nothing matters, but it's perhaps more comfortable to keep calm and not interfere with other people. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
199:The incalculable age and brooding horror of this monstrous waste began to oppress me as never before ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
200:Wave after wave of cats poured down from the hill as if a vent into a world of cats had been opened, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
201:We can take the shuttle at the South Station for Battery Street, and after that the walk isn’t much. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
202: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, #NFDB
203:If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
204:It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
205:jedenfalls hörte ich Donnerschläge und andere Geräusche, welche die Natur nur im Zorne von sich gibt. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
206:That was when I waked half of Arkham with my screaming as I plunged madly up from the abyss of sleep. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
207:The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
208:Ye have done much to bring about the indescribable return. May ye go mad quickly and not be devoured. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
209:I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
210:Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word "eldritch" so many times now that I think about it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
211:Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream. It ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
212:The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
213:The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
214:Old Cairo is itself a story-book and a dream--labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic secrets; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
215:so that I came to regard it as at least a bearable place to hibernate till one might really live again. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
216:and as I watched I felt that it was in turn watching me greedily with eyes more imaginable than visible. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
217:And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
218:Damnation, is but a word bandied about by those
whose blindness leads them to condemn all who can see ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
219:mejor
era vislumbrar un instante el cielo y perecer, que vivir sin haber contemplado
jamás el día. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
220:The Man of Truth has learned that Illusion is the One Reality, and that Substance is the Great Impostor. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
221:No me importaba el futuro; huir, bien mediante curación, inconsciencia o muerte, era cuanto me importaba. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
222:The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
223:Again there was manifest that lure and driving of fatality which had all along seemed to direct my course. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
224:For Arthur Munroe was dead. And on what remained of his chewed and gouged head there was no longer a face. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
225:Hippopotami should not have human hands and carry torches...men should not have the heads of crocodiles... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
226:Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
227:resolved to go with bold entreaty whither no man had gone before, and dare the icy deserts through the dark ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
228:Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
229:the geometry of the place was all wrong. One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
230:They’s allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich—livin’ things—as ain’t human an’ ain’t good fer human folks. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
231:This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
232:Certainly, we were in one of the strangest, weirdest, and most terrible of all the corners of earth’s globe. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
233:Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
234:My eldest cat, “Nigger-Man,” was seven years old and had come with me from my home in Bolton, Massachusetts; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
235:We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
236:Befragt die Geringeren, auf daß nicht die Größeren Euch antworten und mehr heraufbeschwören, als Ihr vermöget ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
237:It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
238:Once more I ventured within those brooding ruins that swelled beneath the sand like an ogre under a coverlet, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
239:And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
240:If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
241:They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
242:And always the shadow of nameless fear hung about the sealed trap-doors and the dark, windowless elder towers. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
243:The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
244:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
245:I recognized the ugly and unwieldy form of the cook, whose very absurdness had now become unutterably tragic. The ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
246:It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
247:Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
248:Nyarlathotep ... das kriechende Chaos ... Ich bin der letzte ... Ich werde es der lauschenden Leere verkünden ... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
249:Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
250:Some said the thunder called the lurking fear out of its habitation, while others said the thunder was its voice. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
251:the real thing behind the way folks feel is simply race prejudice—and I don’t say I’m blaming those that hold it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
252:To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
253:L’emozione più antica e più forte dell’uomo è la paura, e la paura
più antica e più forte è quella dell’ignoto. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
254:Only two of the prisoners were found sane enough to be hanged, and the rest were committed to various institutions. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
255:that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
256:There was that touch of melancholy in his fastidious appearance that suggested the atmosphere of frustrated dreams. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
257:Though these stately old avenues were ill-surfaced and unkempt, their elm-shaded dignity had not entirely departed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
258:But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
259:I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
260:For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
261:In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
262:Nichtsdestotrotz habet Ihr starke Hände, ein Messer und eine Pistole, und es ist nicht schwer, ein Grab zu schaufeln. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
263:Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
264:The oldest and most powerful emotion is fear... And the oldest and most powerful kind of fear is that of the unknown. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
265:The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
266:How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
267:The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
268: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, #NFDB
269:Existen repliegues en el tiempo y en el espacio, en la fantasía y en la realidad, que sólo un soñador puede adivinar... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
270:(...)Hay cosas que no pueden ser contadas, y lo que se hace por humanidad es a veces cruelmente juzgado por la ley(...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
271:There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
272:And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
273:But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
274:Democracy is just a false idol — a mere catchword and illusion of inferior classes, visionaries and dying civilizations. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
275:Hay algo que esos artistas captan -algo que trasciende a la propia vida- y que consiguen transmirnos por unos instantes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
276:Heaven knows where I'll end up - it's a safe bet I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
277:In that shrieking the inmost soul of human fear and agony clawed hopelessly and insanely at the ebony gates of oblivion. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
278:the sailor who broke down the door could perhaps have told frightful things if he had not forthwith gone completely mad— ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
279:And I would tell myself that the realm beyond the wall was not more lasting merely, but more lovely and radiant as well. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
280:Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
281:History had led me to this archaic grave. History, indeed, was all I had after everything else ended in mocking Satanism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
282:The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
283:a new chill from afar out whither the condor had flown, as if my flesh had caught a horror before my eyes had seen it. Nor ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
284: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, #NFDB
285:Quite alone both as a novel and as a piece of terror-literature stands the famous Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
286: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, #NFDB
287: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, #NFDB
288:Everything seemed to me tainted with a loathsome contagion, and inspired by a noxious alliance with distorted hidden powers. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
289: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, #NFDB
290:Still, it’s a nice, cynical book for those who like atrocity scenes—starving prisoners forced to eat their girlfriends, etc. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
291:We shall dive down through black abysses...and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
292:God!...If only I had not read so much Egyptology before coming to this land which is the fountain of all darkness and terror! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
293:great Cyclopean cities of titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
294:knowing that to this sunken place all the dead had come, I trembled and did not wish again to speak with the lotos-faces. Yet ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
295: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, #NFDB
296:In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
297: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, #NFDB
298:The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
299: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, #NFDB
300:for it would not do to brood over the abnormalities of this ancient, blight-shadowed town while I was still within its borders. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
301:In seinem Verhalten schien eine kryptische, sardonische Arroganz zu lauern, als ödeten ihn alle menschlichen Wesen nur noch an. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
302:The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
303:We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
304: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, #NFDB
305:From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
306:If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
307:Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
308: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, #NFDB
309:Heaven knows where I'll end up - but it's a safe bet that I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
310:He used to make shuddering conjectures about the possible actions of a headless physician with the power of reanimating the dead. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
311:It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
312:fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions. Horror ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
313:If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
314:Koltuktaki o şeyler, mükemmel mikroskobik benzerliğin, kimliğin en ince detayına dek; Henry Wentworth Akeley'nin yüzü ve elleriydi. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
315:the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
316:This idea of a black, hidden horror connected with incalculable gulfs of some sort of distance was oddly widespread and persistent. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
317:Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
318:The bleak mountain wind, sighing through the olive grove and the tomb-tree, had an uncanny way of forming vaguely articulate sounds. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
319:There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
320:I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
321:Masson disliked and respected the ferocious little rodents, for he knew the danger that lurked in their flashing, needle-sharp fangs; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
322:That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
323:When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
324:It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. . . . —H. P. LOVECRAFT2 ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
325:La más antigua y poderosa emoción de la humanidad es el miedo, y la clase más antigua y poderosa de miedo es el temor a lo desconocido ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
326: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, #NFDB
327: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, #NFDB
328:nearly a hundred mongrel celebrants in the throng, the police relied on their firearms and plunged determinedly into the nauseous rout. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
329:No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
330: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, #NFDB
331: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, #NFDB
332: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, #NFDB
333: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, #NFDB
334:What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
335:La vida es algo terrible y tras el telón de lo conocido asoman atisbos de demoníaca verdad que la hacen a veces infinitamente más temible. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
336: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, #NFDB
337: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, #NFDB
338:I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous. It ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
339:...and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
340:I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
341:Quizá no deba esperar transmitir con meras palabras la indecible repugnancia que puede reinar en el absoluto silencio y la estéril inmensidad. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
342:As it was, the lethal mustiness blended hideously with the town’s general fishy odour and persistently focussed one’s fancy on death and decay. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
343:If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set first to his clothing one night. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
344: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, #NFDB
345:One could not be sure that the sea and the ground were horizontal, hence the relative position of everything else seemed phantasmally variable. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
346:Someday our piecing together of knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas we shall either go mad or flee into the safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
347:In that moment it seemed as if all the hidden terrors and monstrosities of earth had become articulate in an effort to overwhelm the human race. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
348:It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not his murderer. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
349:It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
350:There were creakings, scurryings, and hoarse doubtful noises; and I thought uncomfortably about the hidden tunnels suggested by the grocery boy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
351:I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror,and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
352:I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
353: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, #NFDB
354: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, #NFDB
355:(...) A mi alrededor había tumbas, oscuridad y soombras; debajo de mí, alguna amenaza más allá de la transcendencia de la imaginación humana (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
356:Es schien mir recht bedauerlich, dass Derby sich gerade für sie interessierte, sagte aber nichts dazu, da Vernarrtheit an Widerstand bloß gedeiht. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
357:I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
358:I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
359:It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor’s fall, and the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could not describe. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
360: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, #NFDB
361:Ygnaiih . . . ygnaiih . . . thflthkh’ngha . . . Yog-Sothoth . . .” rang the hideous croaking out of space. “Y’bthnk . . . h’ehye—n’grkdl’lh. . . . ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
362:I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
363:Original title Al Azif—azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos’d to be the howling of daemons. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
364:At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
365:He was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become and empty sound. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
366:Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
367: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. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
368:It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
369:It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
370:Methought its spirit whispered evil counsel, soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a damnable rhythmical promise which it repeated over and over. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
371:No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.
- Through the Gates of the Silver Key ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
372: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, #NFDB
373: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, #NFDB
374:Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals - for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
375:The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
376: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. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
377:A horrible coma call'd living
So now in this coma call'd living
I view the bright phantoms of beauty;
The false hollow phantoms of beauty ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
378: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, #NFDB
379: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, #NFDB
380:I have an odd craving to whisper about those few frightful hours in that ill-rumoured and evilly shadowed seaport of death and blasphemous abnormality. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
381: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, #NFDB
382:Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
383: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, #NFDB
384:There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
385:There was a darkness outside reality, they say. A darkness full of things. Hungry, nasty things with no shape or form, not as long as they were out there. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
386:fThere was a darkness outside reality, they say. A darkness full of things. Hungry, nasty things with no shape or form, not as long as they were out there. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
387:I felt the strangling tendrils of a cancerous horror whose roots reached into illimitable pasts and fathomless abysms of the night that broods beyond time. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
388:I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
389: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, #NFDB
390:In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring. He lives all alone with his streaked cat in Gray’s Inn, and people call him harmlessly mad. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
391:And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
392:(...) Creo que el profesor Angell murió porque sabía o quería saber demasiado. Es posible que me aguarde un fin parecido, pues yo también he aprendido mucho. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
393: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, #NFDB
394:I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that
may at this very moment be crawling
and floundering on its slimy bed... ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
395:Our apprehensions were over what we might find, or fail to find, at the end of our journey; for silence continued to answer all calls despatched to the camp. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
396: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, #NFDB
397:And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
398:There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought tp stand prepared for any sort of action at any time. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
399: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, #NFDB
400: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. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
401:I have looked upon all that the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and the flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me. But ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
402:La vida es algo espantoso; y desde el trasfondo de lo que conocemos de ella asoman síntomas demoníacos que la vuelven a veces infinitamente más espantosa (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
403:Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
404:Success is a relative thing―and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavius at Actium when measured by the scale of cosmic infinity. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
405: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, #NFDB
406:I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
407:I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
408:All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
409:If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere chance which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
410: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, #NFDB
411:The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
412:The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
413:Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos--to the unknown--which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
414:... să fii conștient că exiști și totuși să știi că nu mai ești o ființă delimitată distinct de celelalte ființe ... este culmea de nespus a spaimei și a agoniei. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
415:scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
416:(...) Se encontraba indudablemente próximo a la frontera entre el universo conocido y la cuarta dimensión, y nadie era capaz de predecir hasta dónde podría llegar. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
417:Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
418:Ho visto oscuri universi spalancarsi
Dove neri pianeti ruotano senza meta...
Dove ruotano nell'orrore invisibile
Privi di consapevolezza, splendore o nome. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
419:I saw the sun peering redly through the last gusts of a little sandstorm that hovered over the nameless city, and marked the quietness of the rest of the landscape. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
420:Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
421:The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that is seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than to worship it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
422: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, #NFDB
423:The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth's gods. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
424: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, #NFDB
425:Be it then known that I was born on the family Estate in Devonshire, of the 10th day of August, 1690 (or in the new Gregorian Stile of Reckoning, the 20th of August), ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
426:I was quite unbalanced with that instinct for the strange and the unknown which had made me a wanderer upon earth and a haunter of far, ancient, and forbidden places. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
427:Man is an essentially superstitious and fearful animal. Take away the herd's Christian gods and saints and they will without failing come to worship...something else. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
428:There is nothing more absurd, as I view it, than that conventional association of the homely and the wholesome which seems to pervade the psychology of the multitude. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
429:Algo me incitaba a buscar en el cielo algunas nubes, ya que se había apoderado de mí una inexplicable aprensión acerca de los infinitos e insondables espacios etéreos. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
430: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. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
431: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, #NFDB
432:there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown. Hot ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
433:Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-mooned abysses of night, I have lived o'er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
434:But most of the men of Teloth yawned, and some laughed and some went away to sleep; for Iranon told nothing useful, singing only his memories, his dreams, and his hopes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
435:Calm, lasting beauty comes only in dream, and this solace the world had thrown away when in its worship of the real it threw away the secrets of childhood and innocence. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
436:I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
437:Man is so used to thinking visually that I almost forgot the darkness and pictured the endless corridor of wood and glass in its low-studded monotony as though I saw it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
438:The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
439: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, #NFDB
440:It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
441: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, #NFDB
442:Three children had just disappeared—blue-eyed Norwegians from the streets toward Gowanus—and there were rumours of a mob forming among the sturdy Vikings of that section. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
443:As a result, these societies became surprisingly passive and reticent. Newspaper men were harder to manage, but seemed largely to coöperate with the government in the end. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
444:I am Providence, and Providence is myself - together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
445:Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
446:Suddenly there came another burst of that acute fear which had intermittently seized me ever since I first saw the terrible valley and the nameless city under a cold moon, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
447: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, #NFDB
448:There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
449:It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
450:Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
451:The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
452:The purpose of my visit, and the frightful abnormalities it postulated, struck me all at once with a chill sensation that nearly overbalanced my ardour for strange delvings. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
453: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, #NFDB
454: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, #NFDB
455:That flopping or pattering was monstrous--I could not look upon the degenerate creatures responsible for it. I would keep my eyes shut till the sound receded toward the west. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
456:Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
457: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, #NFDB
458:I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
459: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, #NFDB
460: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, #NFDB
461:I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
462: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, #NFDB
463:I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
464: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, #NFDB
465:Then came upon an incredible essay by Lafcadio Hearn, something entitled “Gaki,” detailing the curious Japanese belief that insects are really demons or the ghosts of evil men. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
466: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, #NFDB
467: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, #NFDB
468:Wir leben auf einer friedlichen Insel der Ahnungslosigkeit inmitten schwarzer Meere der Unendlichkeit, und es war nicht vorgesehen, dass wir diese Gewässer weit befahren sollen. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
469:It was the end, for whatever remains to me of life on the surface of this earth, of every vestige of mental peace and confidence in the integrity of Nature and of the human mind. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
470:Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
471:All great humorists are sad... I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest - the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
472:I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness. . . . ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
473:Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
474: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, #NFDB
475: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, #NFDB
476:There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
477: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, #NFDB
478:As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream; the purple, star-strown mists beyond Time, where only gods and dreamers walk. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
479:If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
480:The cases were of a strange golden wood, with fronts of exquisite glass, and containing the mummified forms of creatures outreaching in grotesqueness the most chaotic dreams of man. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
481:There are twists of time and space, of vision and reality, which only a dreamer can divine; and from what I know of Carter I think he has merely found a way to traverse these mazes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
482: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, #NFDB
483: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, #NFDB
484:If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
485:Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
486:Nothing is so intimately a part of a man as his library. It contains just what the possessor wants to look at most often, and comes to form his window or gateway to the larger cosmos. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
487:Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
488:I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
489:We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spear others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
490:That nevermore should I behold the blessed light of day, or scan the pleasant hills and dales of the beautiful world outside, my reason could no longer entertain the slightest unbelief. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
491:There were nauseous musical instruments, stringed, grass, and wood-wind, on which St. John and I sometimes produced dissonances of exquisite morbidity and cacodaemoniacal ghastliness... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
492:Sometimes, I believe that this less material life (of dreams) is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
493:Sometimes, I believe that this less material life [of dreams] is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
494: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, #NFDB
495:Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic - the abnormally chromatic entity in The Colour Out of Space being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
496: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, #NFDB
497:(...) Todos tenían la impresión de hallarse muy próximos a fases de la naturaleza y de la vida absolutamente extraordinarias y radicalmente opuestas a la existencia misma de la humanidad. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
498:To me there is nothing more fraught with mystery & terror than a remote Massachusetts farmhouse against a lonely hill. Where else could an outbreak like the Salem witchcraft have occurred? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
499: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, #NFDB
500: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, #NFDB
501:When Kleiner showed me the sky-line of New York I told him that man is like the coral insect — designed to build vast, beautiful, mineral things for the moon to delight in after he is dead. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
502:an' when they git ready... I say, when they git... ever hear tell of a shoggoth? 'Hey, d'ye hear me? I tell ye I know what them things be - I seen 'em one mght when... eh-ahhh-ah! e'yahhh... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
503:Dazedness was uppermost, and I could scarcely recall what was dream and what was reality. Then thought trickled back, and I knew that I had witnessed things more horrible than I had dreamed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
504:having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased’s home ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
505:I recognised the air—it was a wild Hungarian dance popular in the theatres, and I reflected for a moment that this was the first time I had ever heard Zann play the work of another composer. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
506:La atmósfera es siempre el elemento más importante, por cuanto el criterio final de autenticidad de un texto no reside en su argumento, sino en la creación de un estado de ánimo determinado. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
507:seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
508: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, #NFDB
509:Primal myth and modern delusion joined in their assumption that mankind is only one—perhaps the least—of the highly evolved and dominant races of this planet’s long and largely unknown career. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
510:Ahora conocía la diabólica fabula que portaba aquel dorado esplendor, ahora evitaba la tétrica luz que antaño admiré con fervor; y un miedo espantoso y mortal ¡Ha apresado mi alma para siempre! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
511:An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
512:Chronophagos, the Devourer of Time, the Eater of Hours. What man remembereth even the hour of his death if the Chronophagos hath devoured it? —Nicephoros Attaliades, The Testament of Nightmares ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
513: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, #NFDB
514:It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients - or their lack - and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
515:(...) Me tenía completamente trastornado esa pasión por lo extraño y lo desconocido que me había convertido en un errabundo en la tierra y un frecuentador de lugares remotos, antiguos y vedados. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
516:The vast marble dome of the State House stood out in massive silhouette, its crowning statue haloed fantastically by a break in one of the tinted stratus clouds that barred the flaming sky. When ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
517: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, #NFDB
518:We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don't give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They're confounded pretty, and that's all we know and all we need to know! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
519:Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
520:Strange and terrible books were drawn voluminously from the stack shelves and from secure places of storage; and diagrams and formulae were copied with feverish haste and in bewildering abundance. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
521:It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplained couplet: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
522:There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
523:To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
524:Where once had risen walls of 300 cubits and towers yet higher, now stretched only the marshy shore, and where once had dwelt fifty millions of men now crawled only the detestable green water-lizard. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
525:All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
526: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, #NFDB
527:To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest.. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
528:Zoologists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50 -- but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
529:I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
530:I did not shriek, but all the fiendish ghouls that ride the night-wind shrieked for me as in that same second there crashed down upon my mind a single and fleeting avalanche of soul-annihilating memory. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
531:Ma più meravigliosa dei racconti dei vecchi e dei libri, è la voce segreta dell'oceano. Blu, verde, grigio, bianco o nero; calmo, arruffato o tempestoso, l'oceano non è mai in silenzio. (La nave bianca) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
532:Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
533:The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
534:[...] cuando somos niños oímos y soñamos, albergamos ideas a medio cuajar y, cuando al hacernos hombres intentamos recordar, nos vemos estorbados y convertidos en seres prosaicos por el veneno de la vida. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
535:Forms strangely robed, but at once noble and familiar, walked abroad, and under the horned waning moon men talked wisdom in a tongue which I understood, though it was unlike any language I had ever known. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
536:He maintained his new fastidiousness without interruption, added to it an unwonted sparkle of eye and crispness of speech, and began little by little to shed the corpulence which had so long deformed him. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
537: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, #NFDB
538: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, #NFDB
539: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, #NFDB
540:The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H P Lovecraft, and A. Merritt. ~ Gary Gygax, Writing in Appendix N, AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (1979), p. 224, #NFDB
541: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, #NFDB
542:Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days; and they are not communicative, being loath to shake off the drowsiness which helps them forget. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
543: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, #NFDB
544:Es wäre ihnen ein Leichtes, die Erde zu erobern, sie haben es aber bislang nicht versucht, weil dazu keine Notwendigkeit bestand. Sie lassen die Dinge lieber so, wie sie sind, und ersparen sich die Scherereien. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
545: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, #NFDB
546:Two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
547:and worst of all, the unmentionable Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred, in Olaus Wormius’ forbidden Latin translation; a book which I had never seen, but of which I had heard monstrous things whispered. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
548: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, #NFDB
549:The long, winging flight through the void . . . cannot cross the universe of light . . . re-created by the thoughts caught in the Shining Trapezohedron . . . send it through the horrible abysses of radiance. . . . ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
550:(...) el color quema, frío y húmedo (...) todas las cosas vivas (...) golpea a uno la cabeza y luego se apodera de ella (...) y sorbe, procede de algún lugar en donde las cosas no son como aquí (...) chupa la vida. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
551:I was told of the pits of primal life, and of the streams that had trickled down therefrom; and finally, of the tiny rivulet from one of those streams which had become entangled with the destinies of our own earth. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
552: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, #NFDB
553:The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound - and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
554: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, #NFDB
555: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, #NFDB
556: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, #NFDB
557: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, #NFDB
558: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, #NFDB
559:No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
560:nor could they be silenced by my assurance that all the myths were of a well-known pattern common to most of mankind and determined by early phases of imaginative experience which always produced the same type of delusion. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
561: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, #NFDB
562:the prisoners all proved to be men of a very low, mixed-blooded, and mentally aberrant type. Most were seamen, and a sprinkling of negroes and mulattoes, largely West Indians or Brava Portuguese from the Cape Verde Islands, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
563: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, #NFDB
564:Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
565:As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, [and] steel their emotions against decent human sympathy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
566: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, #NFDB
567:[...] la belleza. Cuando la verdad y la experiencia no se la mostraron, se volvió hacia la fantasía y la ilusión, hallándola en sus mismos umbrales, entre los nebulosos recuerdos de los cuentos de su niñez y entre los sueños. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
568:Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
569:Nebunia lui nu avea nimic comun cu nici un soi de demenţă descrisă în tratatele cele mai recente şi mai complete; părea să fie o forţă mentală ce ar fi făcut din el un geniu sau o căpetenie, dacă n-ar fi fost bizar deformată. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
570: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, #NFDB
571: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, #NFDB
572:After a while he began to shudder, and turned away from the scene as if frightened; yet could give no explanation save that he was overcome with the vastness, darkness, remoteness, antiquity, and mystery of the oceanic abysses. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
573: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, #NFDB
574:Fully ten feet high despite a shambling, crouching attitude expressive of infinite cosmic malignancy, a monstrosity of unbelievable horror was shewn starting forward from a Cyclopean ivory throne covered with grotesque carvings. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
575: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, #NFDB
576:Then a yell of utter, ultimate fright and stark madness wrenched from scores of human throats—a yell which came strong and clear despite the depth from which it must have burst; after which darkness and silence ruled all things. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
577:But the ship swept on, and the dusk hushed the hum of the day, and the first stars above blinked answers to the early fireflies on the banks as that jungle fell far behind, leaving only its fragrance as a memory that it had been. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
578:...great eager mists flock to heaven laden with lore, and oceanward eyes on the rocks see only a mystic whiteness, as if the cliff’s rim were the rim of all earth, and the solemn bells of buoys tolled free in the aether of faery. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
579:Free of all responsibility or restraint, in the sheer obliviousness of dreams, he had lived like a happy pagan; and now he must go back to the drear existence of a mediaeval monk, beneath the prompting of an obscure sense of duty. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
580:Stars are aligning. Must quickly say the Black Mass and make the Voorish Sign. My youngest boy went mad. He sits drooling on the porch, trying to play the cat like an accordion. He’s been scratched some. Yer Servant, Ezra Whateley ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
581:If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
582: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, #NFDB
583:As the savage progresses, he acquires experience and formulates codes of 'right' and 'wrong' from his memories of those courses which have helped or hurt him... Then out of the principle of barter comes the illusion of 'justice' ... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
584:I could tell that 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, #NFDB
585:Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
586:Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
587:A coisa mais misericordiosa do mundo é, segundo penso, a incapacidade da mente humana em correlacionar tudo o que sabe. Vivemos em uma plácida ilha de ignorância em meio a mares negros de infinitude, e não fomos feitos para ir longe. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
588:denn dann sei die Menschheit wie die Großen Alten geworden; frei und ungezähmt und jenseits von Gut und Böse, und jedes Gesetz und jede Moral sei zur Seite gefegt, und alle Menschen würden schreien und töten und sich in Lust ergehen. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
589:Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
590: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, #NFDB
591:Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
592:I shuddered oddly in some of the far corners; for certain altars and stones suggested forgotten rites of terrible, revolting, and inexplicable nature, and made me wonder what manner of men could have made and frequented such a temple. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
593:(...) Si, Thurber, hace mucho tiempo que decidí que había que pintar el terror de la vida lo mismo que se pinta su belleza, así que me puse a averiguar en lugares donde tenía fundados motivos para saber que en ellos el terror existía. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
594: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, #NFDB
595:I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
596:Ciertos toques aquí y allá eran vagos indicios de símbolos y estímulos latentes que, si hubiésemos tenido otro trasfondo mental y emocional y un sistema sensorial totalmente diferente, habrían tenido un profundo significado para nosotros. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
597:Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of “white trash” in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
598:(...) Me parecía extraña la escasa altura de los templos principales y del corredor del subsuelo, tallado indudablemente por deferencia las deidades reptiles que ellos adoraban; aunque, claramente, obligaban a los adoradores a reptar (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
599:I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
600:The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
601:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
602: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, #NFDB
603:we had allowed ourselves to become distracted on the way to the Crusade, never laid eyes on a Turk, turned to pillage and rapine among the Hungarians and Greeks in order to reach the East…all for the glory of God, of course, until defeated, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
604: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, #NFDB
605: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, #NFDB
606: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, #NFDB
607:The man himself was pitiably inferior in mentality and language alike; but his glowing, titanic visions, though described in a barbarous disjointed jargon, were assuredly things which only a superior or even exceptional brain could conceive. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
608: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, #NFDB
609:On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
610:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
611:Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
612:His money and lands were gone, and he did not care for the ways of people about him, but preferred to dream and write of his dreams. What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
613:It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. For the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. He ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
614:And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I walked circuitously back to the town by the curving road on the south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
615:I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
616:Whitman Press will publish three children’s textbooks, based on your creed, for which you’ll deliver manuscripts and artwork. The three books are: 1. Dagon and Jill 2. The Shadow Over Humpty Dumpty 3. A Children’s Necronomicon (with pop-up section) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
617:And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
618: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, #NFDB
619: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, #NFDB
620: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, #NFDB
621:Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the comer does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
622:Hei! Aa-shanta 'nygh! You are off! Send back earth's gods to their haunts on unknown Kadath, and pray to all space that you may never meet me in my thousand other forms. Farewell, Randolph Carter, and beware; for I am Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
623:So for generations did the sainted skull of Caius Anicius Magnus Furius Camillus Æmilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus, consul of Rome, favourite of emperors, and saint of the Romish church, lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
624: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, #NFDB
625:Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
626:Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
627:It is natural that such a thing as a dead man's scream should give horror, for it is obviously, not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence; but I was used to similar experiences, hence suffered on this occasion only because of a particular circumstance. And, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
628:It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
629:Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loossed upon the world. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
630: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, #NFDB
631:A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
632:By the Ram with a Thousand Ewes! By the Tail of Dagon and the Horns of Derceto!” said Azédarac, as he fingered the tiny, pot-bellied vial of vermilion liquid on the table before him. “Something will have to be done with this pestilential Brother Ambrose. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
633:A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe's will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
634: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, #NFDB
635:It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
636:Light indeed glowed on the panels ahead, but it was not any light that the moon gives. Terrible and piercing was the shaft of ruddy refulgence that streamed through the Gothic window, and the whole chamber was brilliant with a splendour intense and unearthly. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
637:I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
638:The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
639:For the purpose of securing epithets at once accurate and felicitous, the young author should familiarize himself thoroughly with the general aspect and phenomena of Nature, as well as with the ideas and associations which these things produce in the human mind. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
640:At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
641:I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
642:The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
643: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, #NFDB
644:In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
645:but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
646:From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
647:I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide - the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
648: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, #NFDB
649:From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
650:There are so many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and proasic with the poison of life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
651:There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
652: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, #NFDB
653:In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance's of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
654:Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
655:Auf einem der letzten und zerfallensten Reliefs fiel uns ein watschelndes, primitives Säugetier besonders ins Auge, das von den Landbewohnern teils als Schlachtvieh, teils als lustiger Spaßmacher gehalten wurde – seine affenartigen und menschlichen Ansätze waren nicht zu übersehen. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
656:The unknown ... became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
657:Hoje em dia, com o nosso planeta tão convulsionado pelas hostilidades absurdas da humanidade insignificante, é tranquilizador voltar-se para o azul etéreo e contemplar outros mundos, cada um com fenômenos únicos e pitorescos, onde nenhum eco de conflitos ou sofrimentos humanos ressoa. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
658: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, #NFDB
659: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, #NFDB
660: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, #NFDB
661:Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be. Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
662:The face beside me was twisted almost unrecognisably for a moment, while through the whole body there passed a shivering motion—as if all the bones, organs, muscles, nerves, and glands were readjusting themselves to a radically different posture, set of stresses, and general personality. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
663:Žijeme naše životy na malém ostrůvku zaslepenosti, bez povědomí o temných oceánech nekonečna okolo nás.
Neměli bychom se snažit příliš rozhlížet.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
664: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, #NFDB
665:Whatever universal masterpiece of tomorrow may be wrought from phantasm or terror will owe its acceptance rather to a supreme workmanship than to a sympathetic theme. Yet who shall declare the dark theme a positive handicap? Radiant with beauty, the Cup of the Ptolemies was carven of onyx. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
666:Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
667: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, #NFDB
668:All at once I began dreading to look at them as they passed. I saw the close moonlit space where they would surge by, and had curious thoughts about the irredeemable pollution of that space. They would perhaps be the worst of all Innsmouth types--something one would not care to remember. The ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
669:I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
670: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, #NFDB
671:Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
672: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, #NFDB
673:.. I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
674:Religion is still useful among the herd - that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else... ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
675:Poiché univa all'immaginazione la metodicità scientifica, era conscio del fatto che l'uomo moderno, quando non esistono leggi, tende costantemente a sfogare gli istinti più tenebrosi, che risalgono ai nostri scimmieschi, primitivi antenati, nella vita ordinaria, e nelle manifestazioni di culto. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
676: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, #NFDB
677:Looking desultorily about, his attention had been drawn by a dull glimmering on one of the tables; and he had extricated the queer orblike stone from its shadowy, crowded position between an ugly little Aztec idol, the fossil egg of a dinornis, and an obscene fetish of black wood from the Niger. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
678:You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you ever moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
679:rude cross lay flat upon the barren earth and on it was bound a man—half-naked, wild of aspect with his corded limbs, glaring eyes and shock of tangled hair. His executioners were Roman soldiers, and with heavy hammers they prepared to pin the victim’s hands and feet to the wood with iron spikes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
680:Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
681: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, #NFDB
682:(...) En sus gritos decía cosas tales como que el mundo estaba en peligro, pues los Seres Ancestrales se habían propuesto destruirlo y barrerlo del sistema solar y del cosmos de la materia para sumirlo en otro nivel, o fase corpórea, del que había salido hacía billones y billones de milenios (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
683: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, #NFDB
684:Al despertar no lograba acordarme de todo, pero los fragmentos que recordaba habrían alcanzado para hacerme pasar por un loco, o tal vez por un poeta maldito. Por otra parte, sentía un impulso irracional a alejarme de la vida sana y ordinaria que llevaba, y a lanzame a las tinieblas y la locura (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
685: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; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
686: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, #NFDB
687:fiends. Turning, I saw outlined against the luminous aether of the abyss what could not be seen against the dusk of the corridor—a nightmare horde of rushing devils; hate-distorted, grotesquely panoplied, half-transparent; devils of a race no man might mistake—the crawling reptiles of the nameless city. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
688:It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
689:Little things make considerable excitement in little towns, which is the reason that Kingsport people talked all that spring and summer about the three unidentifiable bodies, horribly slashed as with many cutlasses, and horribly mangled as by the tread of many cruel boot-heels, which the tide washed in. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
690:I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government--but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
691:It was a godless sound; one of those low-keyed, insidious outrages of Nature which are not meant to be. To call it a dull wail, a doom-dragged whine, or a hopeless howl of chorused anguish and stricken flesh without mind would be to miss its most quintessential loathsomeness and soul-sickening overtones. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
692:Sometimes, in the throes of a nightmare when unseen powers whirl one over the roofs of strange dead cities toward the grinning chasm of Nis, it is a relief and even a delight to shriek wildly and throw oneself voluntarily along with the hideous vortex of dream-doom into whatever bottomless gulf may yawn. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
693:the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon the southern horizon were flashes of the lightning that had so lately passed over our heads. My ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
694:The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
695:And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table!
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
696:He talked of his dreams in a strangely poetic fashion; making me see with terrible vividness the damp Cyclopean city of slimy green stone—whose geometry, he oddly said, was all wrong—and hear with frightened expectancy the ceaseless, half-mental calling from underground: “Cthulhu fhtagn”, “Cthulhu fhtagn”. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
697:It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
698:changed to the elevated at the South Station, and at about twelve o’clock had climbed down the steps at Battery Street and struck along the old waterfront past Constitution Wharf. I didn’t keep track of the cross streets, and can’t tell you yet which it was we turned up, but I know it wasn’t Greenough Lane. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
699:It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then these western woods were not feared half so much as the small island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious stone altar older than the Indians. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
700: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, #NFDB
701:That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
702:As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on the lessening of the agony of existence. That plan is most deserving of praise which most ably fosters the creation of the objects and conditions best adapted to diminish the pain of living for those most sensitive to its depressing ravages. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
703:It was an old account book, greatly worn; and the writing was not, apparently, very legible, for the man sometimes held the page close to the flame of the candle to get a stronger light upon it. The shadow of the book would then throw into obscurity a half of the room, darkening a number of faces and figures; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
704: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, #NFDB
705:Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
706:Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.” Legrasse had one point in advance of Professor Webb, for several among his mongrel prisoners had repeated to him what older celebrants had told them the words meant. This text, as given, ran something like this: “In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
707: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, #NFDB
708:They worshipped, so they said, 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; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
709: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, #NFDB
710:Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
711:As to what the things were—explanations naturally varied. The common name applied to them was “those ones,” or “the old ones,” though other terms had a local and transient use. Perhaps the bulk of the Puritan settlers set them down bluntly as familiars of the devil, and made them a basis of awed theological speculation. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
712:Here cosmic sin had entered, and festered by unhallowed rites had commenced the grinning march of death that was to rot us all to fungous abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding. Satan here held his Babylonish court, and in the blood of stainless childhood the leprous limbs of phosphorescent Lilith were laved. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
713:The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
714: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, #NFDB
715:The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
716:Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat - especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
717:Nahum did not send her to the county asylum, but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her locked in the attic. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
718:Para mí no tenían nada de
grotescos los huesos y los esqueletos esparcidos por las criptas de piedra
cavadas en las profundidades de los cimientos. En mi fantasía asociaba estas
cosas con los hechos cotidianos y los hallaba más reales que las figuras en
colores de seres vivos que veía en muchos libros mohosos. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
719: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, #NFDB
720:This night shalt thou know the favour of the Gods, and behold on Parnassus those dreams which the Gods have through ages sent to earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of Gods, and in each and every age someone hath sung unknowingly the message and the promise from the lotosgardens beyond the sunset. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
721:I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. 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, #NFDB
722:Lovecraft also likes to play with the idea of fate. In many of Lovecraft’s stories the protagonist is not in control of his own actions but must follow the path of fate. Many of his characters would be free from danger if they were simply able to run away but this is not possible as the course of their fate must be followed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
723: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, #NFDB
724:The one test of the really weird is simply this—whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
725:For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
726:I shall plan my cousin's escape from that Canton mad-house, and together we shall go to marvel-shadowed Innsmouth. We shall swim out to that brooding reef in the sea and dive down through black abysses to Cyclopean and many-columned Y'ha-nthlei, and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory for ever. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
727:That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. 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, #NFDB
728:(...) Al profesor Upham le causó especial placer su demostración de la relación que existía entre las matemáticas superiores y ciertas fases de la magia transmitidas a lo largo de los milenios desde tiempos de inenarrabale antigüedad, humanos o prehumanos, cuando se tenían mayores conocimientos acerca del cosmos y de sus leyes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
729:That Crawford Tillinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. 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, #NFDB
730:These beings were like the waters of the river Than, not to be understood. Their deeds I recall not, for they were but of the moment. Their aspect I recall dimly, for it was like to that of the little apes in the trees. Their name I recall clearly, for it rhymed with that of the river. These beings of yesterday were called Man. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
731:Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
732:...and then, with the first and last sound I ever uttered—a ghastly ululation that revolted me almost as poignantly as its noxious cause—I beheld in full, frightful vividness the inconceivable, indescribable, and unmentionable monstrosity which had by its simple appearance changed a merry company to a herd of delirious fugitives. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
733:As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horors-one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
734:Once a wily and wicked person, perceiving her helplessness, offered her a position as dish-washer in a fashionable and depraved cabaret; but our heroine was true to her rustic ideals and refused to work in such a gilded and glittering palace of frivolity—especially since she was offered only $3.00 per week with meals but no board. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
735: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, #NFDB
736:La mia sbrigliata immaginazione credette di vedere, allo stesso tempo, una piovra, un drago e una caricatura umana. Aveva una testa rotonda, irta di tentacoli e posta su di un corpo grottesco e squamoso, da cui spuntavano due ali rudimentali: e c'era qualcosa, in quell'insieme, che rendeva la figura quanto mai spaventosa e ripugnante. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
737:Out of the unimaginable blackness beyond the gangrenous glare of that cold flame, out of the Tartarean leagues through which that oily river rolled uncanny, unheard, and unsuspected, there flopped rhythmically a horde of tame, trained, hybrid winged things that no sound eye could ever wholly grasp, or sound brain ever wholly remember. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
738:The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
739:life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
740:May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
741:I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
742: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, #NFDB
743:It is good to be a cynic--it is better to be a contented cat--and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world--we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
744: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, #NFDB
745:Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
746:No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity. Merging with nothingness is peaceful oblivion; but to be aware of existence and yet to know that one is no longer a definite being distinguished from other beings—that one no longer has a self—that is the nameless summit of agony and dread. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
747: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, #NFDB
748:Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
749:Poor devils! After all, they were not evil things of their kind. They were the men of another age and another order of being. Nature had played a hellish jest on them—as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter drag up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste—and this was their tragic homecoming. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
750:With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
751:It is good to be a cynic - it is better to be a contented cat - and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world - we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death - the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
752: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, #NFDB
753:The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
754:Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the... cosmos... gives a damn one way or the the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
755:Have only this consolation--that he was never a fiend or even truly a madman, but only an eager, studious, and curious boy whose love of mystery and of the past was his undoing. He stumbled on things no mortal ought ever to know, and reached back through the years as no one ever should reach; and something came out of those years to engulf him. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
756: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, #NFDB
757:Religion is at the core of a lot of Lovecraft’s writing. Many of his stories focus around deities, sometimes taking on the role of aliens who are worshipped by humans as deities, who are either indifferent or actively hostile to humans. This is all particularly interesting as Lovecraft marked himself as either atheist or agnostic during his life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
758:There is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
759:We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
760:It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness. … The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
761:Scrivo in uno stato di tensione insostenibile. Fra poco sarà l'alba e, allora, io non esisterò più. Privo d'ogni mezzo, privo della droga che — sola — mi ha consentito fino ad oggi di sopravvivere ai miei incubi, non mi rimane altro modo per sottrarmi al tormento: mi getterò dall'alta finestra di questa soffitta, nella squallida strada sottostante. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
762:The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
763: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. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
764:the while shouting his determination to reach some ‘big, big cabin with brightness in the roof and walls and floor, and the loud queer music far away’. As two men of moderate size sought to restrain him, he had struggled with maniacal force and fury, screaming of his desire and need to find and kill a certain ‘thing that shines and shakes and laughs’. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
765: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, #NFDB
766:I read odd books and entertained odd ideas (however furtively), largely ignored by my family; and at that age I was looking hard for someone to follow, a mentor of any sort, who would take me under his wing and recognize my special talents (assuming that I had any) and tell me the secret of how everything worked, so I could avoid pain. And there you were. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
767:Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine; Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace, And copies Ovid's filth without his grace. In his rough brain a genius might have grown, Had he not sought to play the brute alone; But void of shame, he let his wit run wild, And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
768:I can look back . . . at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust - a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
769:Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension. (Dreams In The Witch-House) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
770: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 torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's 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. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
771:Wherefore do ye toil; is it not that ye may live and be happy? And if ye toil only that ye my toil more, when shall happiness find you? Ye toil to live, but is not life made of beauty and song? And if ye suffer no singers among you, where shall be the fruits of your toil? Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. Were not death more pleasing? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
772:Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
773:I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups - (a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logick. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
774:My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
775:several of our company told of ghosts, one, how a man had been slain on the way to the wars, but had not known it, his ghost going on, thinking himself alive, performing deeds of great valor, even returning home in triumph where he bought lands, begot sons, and lived in contentment for many years before discovering one day, by chance, that he was already dead. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
776:There is in certain ancient things a trace
Of some dim essence --
More than form or weight;
A tenuous aether, indeterminate,
Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.
A faint, veiled sign of continuities
That outward eyes can never quite descry;
Of locked dimensions harboring years gone by,
And out of reach except for hidden keys. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
777: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, #NFDB
778:Non- Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
(Dreams In The Witch-House) ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
779:The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. Theosophists ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
780: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, #NFDB
781:We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
782:Lenta pero inexorablemente, arrastrándose sobre mi conciencia e imponiéndose a cualquier otra impresión, llegó un temor vertiginoso a lo desconocido, un miedo tanto mayor cuando que no podía analizarlo y que parecía concernir a una furtiva amenaza que se aproximaba..., no la muerte, sino algo sin nombre, un ente inusitado indeciblemente más espantoso y aborrecible. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
783:Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
784:And, most vivid of all, there was the dramatic epic of the rats - the scampering army of obscene vermin which had burst forth from the castle three months after the tragedy that doomed it to desertion - the lean, filthy, ravenous army which had swept all before it and devoured fowl, cats, dogs, hogs, sheep, and even two hapless human beings before its fury was spent. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
785:Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of old, and where They shall break through again. He knows where They have trod earth's fields, and where They still tread them, and why no one can behold Them as They tread. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
786: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, #NFDB
787:(...) El hecho de que el temor de que tratamos aquí sea puramente espiritual -tan intenso en proporción como sin objeto en la tierra- y que predomine en el período de nuestra inocente infancia, plantea problemas cuya solución puede aportarnos una idea de nuestra condición previa a la creación del mundo o, cuando menos, un indicio del tenebroso reino de la preexistencia. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
788:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
789:Etienne’s son Paul, a surly fellow whose erratic conduct had probably provoked the riot which wiped out the family, was particularly a source of speculation; and though Providence never shared the witchcraft panics of her Puritan neighbours, it was freely intimated by old wives that his prayers were neither uttered at the proper time nor directed toward the proper object. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
790:It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is - since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
791: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, #NFDB
792: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, #NFDB
793: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, #NFDB
794:In time he grew so impatient of the bleak intervals of day that he began buying drugs in order to increase his periods of sleep. Hasheesh helped a great deal, and once sent him to a part of space where form does not exist, but where glowing gases study the secrets of existence. And a violet-coloured gas told him that this part of space was outside what he had called infinity. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
795:When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
796:Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”
— “Supernatural Horror in Literature ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
797:And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving. They were twitching morbidly and spasmodically, clawing in convulsive and epileptic madness at the moonlit clouds; scratching impotently in the noxious air as if jerked by some allied and bodiless line of linkage with subterrene horrors writhing and struggling below the black roots. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
798:I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
799:(...) A menudo suponía misericordioso que la mayoría de las personas inteligentes se mofaran de los misterios más recónditos, pues, porfiaba, si las mentes superiores entraran alguna vez en comunicación plena con los secretos guardados por antiguos cultos inferiores, no tardarían las anormalidades no sólo en destruir el mundo, sino en amenazar la misma integridad del universo (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
800:And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
801:Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
802:Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as 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, #NFDB
803:(...) Ese tiempo sería fácil de conocer, pues entonces la humanidad se parecería a los Grandes Antiguos: salvaje y libre, más allá del bien y del mal, sin moral y sin ley. Y todos los seres humanos gritarían y matarían, y gozarían felices. Los Antiguos, liberados, enseñarían nuevos modos de gritar y matar y gozar, y el mundo entero ardería en un holocausto de libertad y éxtasis (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
804: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, #NFDB
805:Los hombres de más amplio intelecto saben que no existe una verdadera distinción entre lo real y lo irreal; que todas las cosas aparecen tal como son tan sólo en virtud de los frágiles sentidos físicos y mentales mediante los que las percibimos; pero el prosaico materialismo de la mayoría tacha de locuras a los destellos de clarividencia que traspasan el vulgar velo del empirismo soez ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
806:The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
807:Some of them stole off to those cryptical realms which are known only to cats and which villagers say are on the moon's dark side, whither the cats leap from tall housetops; but one small black kitten crept upstairs and sprang in Carter's lap to purr and play, and curled up near his feet when he lay down at last on the little couch whose pillows were stuffed with fragrant drowsy herbs. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
808:Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
809:There will always be a small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
810:Los hombres de más amplio intelecto saben que no existe una verdadera distinción entre lo real y lo irreal; que todas las cosas aparecen tal como son tan solo en virtud de los frágiles sentidos físicos y mentales mediante los que las percibimos; pero el prosaico materialismo de la mayoría tacha de locuras a los destellos de clarividencia que traspasan el vulgar velo del empirismo chabacano. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
811:The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
812:Carters of forms both human and non-human, vertebrate and invertebrate, conscious and mindless, animal and vegetable. And more, there were Carters having nothing in common with earthly life, but moving outrageously amidst backgrounds of other planets and systems and galaxies and cosmic continua; spores of eternal life drifting from world to world, universe to universe, yet all equally himself. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
813:Denn dieser Ort konnte keine gewöhnliche Stadt sein – er musste den ursprünglichen Kern und Mittelpunkt irgendeines urzeitlichen und unfassbaren Kapitels der Erdgeschichte gebildet haben, der nur in den dunkelsten und verzerrtesten Mythen vagen Widerhall findet und vom Chaos der Erdwehen verschlungen wurde, lange bevor irgendeine uns bekannte Menschenrasse aus dem Affenstadium herauswatschelte ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
814: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, #NFDB
815:Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... - Algernon Blackwood ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
816: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, #NFDB
817:It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now - but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
818:yo nunca voy a dormir tranquilo de nuevo cuando piense en los horrores que acechan sin cesar detrás de la vida, en el tiempo y en el espacio, y en esas blasfemias impías de los Antiguos estelares que sueñan bajo el mar, conocidos y favorecidos por un culto de pesadilla, listo y deseoso de lanzarse sobre el mundo cuando un nuevo terremoto saque su monstruosa ciudad de piedra de nuevo al sol y el aire. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
819:The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind--yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
820:Kuranes was not modern, and did not think like others who wrote. Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone.1 When truth and experience failed to reveal it, he sought it in fancy and illusion, and found it on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
821: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, #NFDB
822:It is an unfortunate fact that every man who seeks to disseminate knowledge must contend not only against ignorance itself, but against false instruction as well. No sooner do we deem ourselves free from a particularly gross superstition, than we are confronted by some enemy to learning who would set aside all the intellectual progress of years, and plunge us back into the darkness of mediaeval disbelief. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
823:Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous. Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species—if separate species we be—for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
824: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, #NFDB
825:his appearance was that of the typical denizen of the Catskill Mountain region; one of those strange, repellent scions of a primitive colonial peasant stock whose isolation for nearly three centuries in the hilly fastnesses of a little-travelled countryside has caused them to sink to a kind of barbaric degeneracy, rather than advance with their more fortunately placed brethren of the thickly settled districts. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
826:My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time. In broad daylight, and at most seasons I am apt to think the greater part of it a mere dream; but sometimes in the autumn, about two in the morning when winds and animals howl dismally, there comes from inconceivable depths below a damnable suggestions of rhythmical throbbing ... and I feel that the transition of Juan Romero was a terrible one indeed. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
827: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, #NFDB
828: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, #NFDB
829:In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror - indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
830: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, #NFDB
831:Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents, he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie path before his home—where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
832:Perché lavorate? Non potreste limitarvi a vivere ed essere contenti? E se vi affaticate solo per potervi affaticare di più, quando troverete la felicità? Voi dite di lavorare per vivere, ma la vita non è fatta di bellezza e canzoni? E se non sopportate fra di voi un cantore, dove vanno i frutti di tanto lavoro? Lavorare senza divertirsi è come fare un viaggio interminabile senza meta. Non sarebbe meglio morire? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
833: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, #NFDB
834:I s’pose you know—though I can see you’re a Westerner by your talk—what a lot our New England ships used to have to do with queer ports in Africa, Asia, the South Seas, and everywhere else, and what queer kinds of people they sometimes brought back with ’em. You’ve probably heard about the Salem man that came home with a Chinese wife, and maybe you know there’s still a bunch of Fiji Islanders somewhere around Cape Cod. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
835:You have been my friend in the cosmos; you have been my only friend on this planet - the only soul to sense and seek for me within the repellent form which lies on this couch. We shall meet again - perhaps in the shining mists of Orion’s Sword, perhaps on a bleak plateau in prehistoric Asia. Perhaps in unremembered dreams tonight; perhaps in some other form an aeon hence, when the solar system shall have been swept away. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
836:I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
837:Il a dû être piégé par le naufrage alors qu'il se trouvait dans sa noire citadelle, sinon, à l'heure qu'il est, le monde entier hurlerait de terreur. Qui peut prévoir la fin ? Ce qui a surgi peut disparaître, et ce qui a sombré peut surgir à nouveau. L'abjection attend son heure en rêvant au fond de la mer, et la mort plane sur les cités chancelantes des hommes. Un jour viendra - mais non, je ne dois ni ne puis y penser ! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
838: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, #NFDB
839: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, #NFDB
840: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, #NFDB
841:Besides human tissue, West employed much of the reptile embryo tissue which he had cultivated with such singular results. It was better than human material for maintaining life in organless fragments, and that was now my friend's chief activity. In a dark corner of the laboratory, over a queer incubating burner, he kept a large covered vat full of this reptilian cell-matter; which multiplied and grew puffily and hideously. On ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
842:had seen nothing like it before save in the magic vistas that sometimes form the backgrounds of Italian primitives. Sodoma and Leonardo conceived such expanses, but only in the distance, and through the vaultings of Renaissance arcades. We were now burrowing bodily through the midst of the picture, and I seemed to find in its necromancy a thing I had innately known or inherited, and for which I had always been vainly searching. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
843:I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
844:Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
845:If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
846: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, #NFDB
847:Next year I may be dwelling in the Egypt which you call ancient, or in the cruel empire of Tsan Chan which is to come three thousand years hence. You and I have drifted to the worlds that reel about the red Arcturus, and dwelt in the bodies of the insect-philosophers that crawl proudly over the fourth moon of Jupiter. How little does the earth self know life and its extent! How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
848:Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.... To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
849:For though Kuranes was a monarch in the land of dream, with all imagined pomps and marvels, splendours and beauties, ecstasies and delights, novelties and excitements at his command, he would gladly have resigned for ever the whole of his power and luxury and freedom for one blessed day as a simple boy in that pure and quiet England, that ancient, beloved England which had moulded his being and of which he must always be immutably a part. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
850: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, #NFDB
851:Sheehan's Pool Room, which adorns one of the lesser alleys in the heart of Chicago's stockyard district, is not a nice place. Its air, freighted with a thousand odours such as Coleridge may have found at Cologne, too seldom knows the purifying rays of the sun; but fights for space with the acrid fumes of unnumbered cheap cigars and cigarettes which dangle from the coarse lips of unnumbered human animals that haunt the place day and night. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
852: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 Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten.
- The Cats of Ulthar, HP Lovecraft ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
853:Kuranes no era moderno, y no pensaba como los demás escritores. Mientras ellos se esforzaban en despojar la vida de sus bordados ropajes del mito y mostrar con desnuda fealdad lo repugnante que es la realidad, Kuranes buscaba tan sólo la belleza. Y cuando no conseguía revelar la verdad y la experiencia, la buscaba en la fantasía y la ilusión, en cuyo mismo umbral la descubría entre los brumosos recuerdos de los cuentos y los sueños de niñez. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
854:Certainly, the terror of a deserted house swells in geometrical rather than arithmetical progression as houses multiply to form a city of stark desolation. The sight of such endless avenues of fishy-eyed vacancy and death, and the thought of such linked infinities of black, brooding compartments given over to cob-webs and memories and the conqueror worm, start up vestigial fears and aversions that not even the stoutest philosophy can disperse. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
855: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, #NFDB
856:What I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system . . . a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
857: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, #NFDB
858:(...) Yo me dedico a captar las emanaciones del alma, y eso es algo que no se encuentra en las advenedizas y artificiales calles construidas por el hombre (...) En caso de haber fantasmas aquí, serían todos los fantasmas domesticados de cualquier marisma pantanosa o gruta poco profunda, y yo lo que necesito son fantasmas humanos: los fantasmas de seres lo bastante refinados como para asomarse al infierno y comprender el significado de lo visto allí. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
859:So here we all were in the mystic sunset of the autumn hills—old Scribonius Libo in his toga prætexta, the golden light glancing on his shiny bald head and wrinkled hawk face, Balbutius with his gleaming helmet and breastplate, blue-shaven lips compressed in conscientiously dogged opposition, young Asellius with his polished greaves and superior sneer, and the curious throng of townsfolk, legionaries, tribesmen, peasants, lictors, slaves, and attendants. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
860:He was told how childish and limited is the notion of a tri-dimensional world, and what an infinity of directions there are besides the known directions of up-down, forward-backward, right-left. He was shown the smallness and tinsel emptiness of the little Earth gods, with their petty, human interests and connetions—their hatreds, rages, loves, and vanities; their craving for praise and sacrifice, and their demands for faith contrary to reason and Nature. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
861:So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted entreating hands to the single black ruined tower that reached above the forest into the unknown outer sky. And at last I resolved to scale that tower, fall through I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without even beholding day. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
862:Thus I began my systematic though half-bewildered tour of Innsmouth's narrow, shadow-blighted ways. Crossing the bridge and turning toward the roar of the lower falls, I passed close to the Marsh refinery, which seemed to be oddly free from the noise of industry. The building stood on the steep river bluff near a bridge and an open confluence of streets which I took to be the earliest civic center, displaced after the Revolution by the present Town Square. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
863: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, #NFDB
864:God! Could it be possible that here lay the mortal relics of half the titan thinkers of all the ages; snatched by supreme ghouls from crypts where the world thought them safe, and subject to the beck and call of madmen who sought to drain their knowledge for some still wilder end whose ultimate effect would concern, as poor Charles had hinted in his frantic note, ‘all civilisation, all natural law, perhaps even the fate of the solar system and the universe’? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
865:Then the resplendent aura of my brother of light drew near and held colloquy with me, soul to soul, with silent and perfect interchange of thought. The hour was one of approaching triumph, for was not my fellow-being escaping at last from a degrading periodic bondage; escaping forever, and preparing to follow the accursed oppressor even unto the uttermost fields of ether, that upon it might be wrought a flaming cosmic vengeance which would shake the spheres? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
866:Madness rides the star-wind . . . claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses . . . dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins of buried temples of Belial. . . . 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, #NFDB
867:One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
868: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, #NFDB
869:place for an artist to live is the North End. If any aesthete were sincere, he’d put up with the slums for the sake of the massed traditions. God, man! Don’t you realize that places like that weren’t merely made, but actually grew? Generation after generation lived and felt and died there, and in days when people weren’t afraid to live and fed and die. Don’t you know there was a mill on Copp’s Hill in 1632, and that half the present streets were laid out by 1650? ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
870: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, #NFDB
871:More wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of the ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days I have watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and time. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
872:He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
873:Some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze andstone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horsesalong the edges of thick forests, and then we know that we have looked backthrough the ivory gates into that world of wonder that was ours, before we were wise and unhappy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
874:It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
875:Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair.
—"Azathoth" from Dagon and Other Macabre Tales ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
876:We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
877:Deberían saber que no fui yo. Deberían saber que fueron las ratas, las sigilosas y famélicas ratas, las que con su incesante ajetreo no me dejan conciliar el sueño, las diabólicas ratas que se pasan todo el tiempo correteando detrás de los acolchados muros de mi habitación, y que me invitan a que las siga en la búsqueda de nuevos horrores que no pueden siquiera compararse con los hasta ahora conocidos, las ratas que nadie más que yo puede oír, las ratas, las ratas de las paredes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
878: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, #NFDB
879: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, #NFDB
880:forests of monsterous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannible devils; mound like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion...insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation...Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
881:This was no fruit of such worlds and suns as shine on the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. This was no breath from the skies whose motions and dimensions our astronomers measure or deem too vast to measure. It was just a colour out of space - a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
882: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, #NFDB
883:The whips and the instruments of torture, the dust or salts from the jug of “Materia”, the two lekythoi from the “Custodes” shelf, the robes, the formulae on the walls, the notes on the pad, the hints from letters and legends, and the thousand glimpses, doubts, and suppositions which had come to torment the friends and parents of Charles Ward—all these engulfed the doctor in a tidal wave of horror as he looked at that dry greenish powder outspread in the pedestalled leaden kylix on the floor. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
884:After the doctors and nurses had left, I whispered an awestruck question: "Good God, Manton, but what was it? Those scars - was it like that?"
And I was too dazed to exult when he whispered back a thing I had half expected "No - it wasn't that way at all. It was everywhere - a gelatin - a slime yet it had shapes, a thousand shapes of horror beyond all memory. There were eyes - and a blemish. It was the pit - the maelstrom - the ultimate abomination. Carter, it was the unnamable! ~ H P Lovecraft, The Unnamable,#NFDB
885:Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries - or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me - in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
886:After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space -- to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
887:All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
888:When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
889: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. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realize, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
890:The chief value of reading is the exercise and discipline it gives the mind - the way it teaches us to think, be intelligently curious about things, recognise general principles under varied individual surfaces, compare and correlate seemingly remote subjects and events, know where and how to get information, appreciate and understand history and our environment, employ judgement and proportion, enjoy genuine art and beauty, and transfer our interest from the trivial and meaningless to the significant. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
891:I am only about half alive - a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However - so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
892:It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. Personally I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born, yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
893:I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
894:I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
895:Escribo esto bajo una considerable tensión mental, ya que al caer la noche mi existencia tocará a su fin. Sin un céntimo y agotada la provisión de droga que es lo único que me hace soportable la vida, no podré aguantar mucho más esta tortura y me arrojaré por la ventana de esta buhardilla a la mísera calle de abajo. Que mi adicción a la morfina no les lleve a considerarme un débil o un degenerado. Cuando hayan leído estas páginas apresuradamente garabateadas, podrán comprender, aunque no completamente, por qué debo olvidar o morir. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
896:When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
897:When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
898:To say that we actually believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather must it be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three-dimensional space because of its more intimate connexion with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage-point, may never hope to understand. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
899:The true weird tale has something more than secret murder, bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule. A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain--a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those fixed laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
900:The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from everyday life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to tappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
901:The appeal of the spectrally macabre is generally narrow because it demands from the reader a certain degree of imagination and a capacity for detachment from every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
902:The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
903:Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
904:Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is - both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology - of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
905:As for bringing the Necronomicon into objective existence—I wish indeed I had the time and imagination to assist in such a project...but I’m afraid it’s a rather large order—especially since the dreaded volume is supposed to run something like a thousand pages! I have ‘quoted’ from pages as high as 770 or thereabouts. Moreover, one can never produce anything even a tenth as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about. If anyone were to try to write the Necronomicon, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
906:Shreiking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguinated condors of purple fulgurous sky... formless phantasms and kalaidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
907:The cloudless day is richer at its close;
A golden glory settles on the lea;
Soft, stealing shadows hint of cool repose
To mellowing landscape, and to calming sea.
And in that nobler, gentler, lovelier light,
The soul to sweeter, loftier bliss inclines;
Freed form the noonday glare, the favour’d sight
Increasing grace in earth and sky divines.
But ere the purest radiance crowns the green,
Or fairest lustre fills th’ expectant grove,
The twilight thickens, and the fleeting scene
Leaves but a hallow’d memory of love! ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
908:And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
909:Art has been wrecked by a complete consciousness of the universe which shews that the world is to each man only a rubbish-heap limned by his individual perception. It will be saved, if at all, by the next and last step of disillusion; the realisation that complete consciousness and truth are themselves valueless, and that to acquire any genuine artistic titillation we must artificially invent limitations of consciousness and feign a pattern of life common to all mankind--most naturally the simple old pattern which ancient and groping tradition first gave us. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
910:Though at times interested in reforms, notably prohibition (I have never tasted alcoholic liquor), I was inclined to be bored by ethical casuistry; since I believed conduct to be a matter of taste and breeding, with virtue, delicacy, and truthfulness as symbols of gentility. Of my word and honour I was inordinately proud, and would permit no reflections to be cast upon them. I thought ethics too obvious and commonplace to be scientifically discussed, and considered philosophy solely in its relation to truth and beauty. I was, and still am, pagan to the core. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
911:The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.
If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
912:Of the cult, he said that he thought the centre lay amid the pathless deserts of Arabia, where Irem, the City of Pillars, dreams hidden and untouched. It was not allied to the European witch-cult, and was virtually unknown beyond its members. No book had ever really hinted of it, though the deathless Chinamen said that there were double meanings in the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred which the initiated might read as they chose, especially the much-discussed couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
913:It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
914:the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos-blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
915:An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation. No man can learn to reason and appraise from a mere perusal of the writing of others. If he live not in the world, where he can observe the public at first hand and be directed toward solid reality by the force of conversation and spoken debate, then he must sharpen his discrimination and regulate his perceptive balance by an equivalent exchange of ideas in epistolary form. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
916:It is said that in Ulthar, which lies beyond the river Skai, no man may kill a cat; and this I can verily believe as I gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. 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 Meroë and Ophir. He is the kin of the jungle’s lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister Africa. The Sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the Sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
917:A veces menguaba la sensación de caída mientras sentía que el universo o las eras se desplomaban antes mí. Mis sufrimientos cesaron repentinamente y comencé a asociar el latido con una fuerza externa más que con una interna. También se había detenido la caída, dando paso a una sensación de descanso efímero e inquieto y, cuando escuché con mayor atención, fantaseé con que los latidos procedieran de un mar inmenso e inescrutable, como si sus siniestras y colosales rompientes laceraran alguna playa desolada tras una tempestad de titánica magnitud. Entonces abrí los ojos. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
918:Si hay algo que nos salva en este mundo… es la incapacidad de la mente humana para correlacionar todos sus contenidos. Vivimos en una isla de ignorancia en medio de los mares negros del infinito, y no estamos hechos para viajar lejos…
[…] Hay terrores que caminan por los pasillos de los sueños cada noche, que embrujan el mundo de los sueños, terrores que pueden relacionarse con los aspectos más mundanos de la vida cotidiana. Cada vez estoy más convencido de la existencia de un mundo fuera de éste en que estamos, lindante con él pero quizá completamente alucinatorio. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
919: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. And yet I am strangely content and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
920:While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
921:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its content. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
922:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
923:when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges. My immediate sensations are incapable of analysis. To be confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of the presence of man or spirit, produced in my brain a horror of the most acute description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
924:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
925:Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing. Prime emphasis should be given to subtle suggestion - imperceptible hints and touches of selective associative detail which express shadings of mood and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal. Avoid bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and symbolism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
926:many pairs of legs and with two great bat-like wings in the middle of the back. They sometimes walked on all their legs, and sometimes on the hindmost pair only, using the others to convey large objects of indeterminate nature. On one occasion they were spied in considerable numbers, a detachment of them wading along a shallow woodland watercourse three abreast in evidently disciplined formation. Once a specimen was seen flying—launching itself from the top of a bald, lonely hill at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon. These ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
927:El monstruoso ser ha desaparecido para siempre -dijo Armitage-. Ha vuelto al seno de lo que era en un principio y ya no puede volver a existir. Era una anormalidad en un mundo normal. Sólo en una mínima parte estaba compuesto de materia, en cualquiera de las acepciones que la conocemos. Era igual a su padre, y una gran parte de su ser ha vuelto a fundirse con aquél en algún reino o dimensión desconocido allende nuestro mundo material, en algún abismo desconocido del que sólo los más infernales ritos de la perversidad humana le permitirían salir tras invocarlo por unos instantes en las cumbres montañosas. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
928:Yet when I looked from that highest of all gable windows, looked while the candles sputtered and the insane viol howled with the night-wind, I saw no city spread below, and no friendly lights gleamed from remembered streets, but only the blackness of space illimitable; unimagined space alive with motion and music, and having no semblance of anything on earth. And as I stood there looking in terror, the wind blew out both the candles in that ancient peaked garret, leaving me in savage and impenetrable darkness with chaos and pandemonium before me, and the demon madness of that night-baying viol behind me. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
929:That is what they say I said when they found me in the blackness after three hours; found me crouching in the blackness over the plump, half-eaten body of Capt. Norrys, with my own cat leaping and tearing at my throat....When I speak of poor Norrys they accuse me of a hideous thing, but they must know that I did not do it. They must know it was the rats; the slithering, scurrying rats whose scampering will never let me sleep; the daemon rats that race behind the padding in this room and beckon me down to greater horrors than I have ever known; the rats they can never hear; the rats, the rats in the walls. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
930:What do we know … of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
931:After that I went to Sydney and talked profitlessly with seamen and members of the vice-admiralty court. I saw the Alert, now sold and in commercial use, at Circular Quay in Sydney Cove, but gained nothing from its non-committal bulk. The crouching image with its cuttlefish head, dragon body, scaly wings, and hieroglyphed pedestal, was preserved in the Museum at Hyde Park; and I studied it long and well, finding it a thing of balefully exquisite workmanship, and with the same utter mystery, terrible antiquity, and unearthly strangeness of material which I had noted in Legrasse’s smaller specimen. Geologists, ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
932:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.
~ H P Lovecraft, The Call Of Cthulhu,#NFDB
933:Well did the traveler know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Cerenerian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Oukranos that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colors of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a faery place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
934:You know,’ he said, ‘there are things that won’t do for Newbury Street—things that are out of place here, and that can’t be conceived here, anyhow. It’s my business to catch the overtones of the soul, and you won’t find those in a parvenu set of artificial streets on made land. Back Bay isn’t Boston—it isn’t anything yet, because it’s had no time to pick up memories and attract local spirits. If there are any ghosts here, they’re the tame ghosts of a salt marsh and a shallow cove; and I want human ghosts— the ghosts of beings highly organized enough to have looked on hell and known the meaning of what they saw. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
935:Gradually I came to find Herbert West himself more horrible than anything he did—that was when it dawned on me that his once normal scientific zeal for prolonging life had subtly degenerated into a mere morbid and ghoulish curiosity and secret sense of charnel picturesqueness. His interest became a hellish and perverse addiction to the repellently and fiendishly abnormal; he gloated calmly over artificial monstrosities which would make most healthy men drop dead from fright and disgust; he became, behind his pallid intellectuality, a fastidious Baudelaire of physical experiment—a languid Elagabalus of the tombs. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
936:I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests — a Viking berserk killer — a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa — a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires — a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras — a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls — a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures — a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans — a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim — a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
937:Ritengo che la cosa più misericordiosa al mondo sia l'incapacità della mente umana di mettere in correlazione tutti i suoi contenuti. Viviamo su una placida isola di ignoranza nel mezzo del nero mare dell'infinito, e non era destino che navigassimo lontano. Le scienze, ciascuna tesa nella propria direzione, ci hanno finora nuociuto ben poco; ma, un giorno, la connessione di conoscenze disgiunte aprirà visioni talmente terrificanti della realtà, e della nostra spaventosa posizione in essa che, o diventeremo pazzi per la rivelazione, o fuggiremo dalla luce mortale nella pace e nella sicurezza di un nuovo Medioevo". ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
938:Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory. It is as if our inward selves, released from the bonds of daytime and objectivity, revelled in prisoned emotions which are hastily stifled when we translate them. In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them rests no yoke of line or hue. Forgotten scenes, and lands more obscure than the golden world of childhood, spring into the sleeping mind to reign until awakening puts them to rout. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
939:A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however, is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
940:The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
The Call Of Cthulhu, incipit. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
941:They worshipped, so they said, 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; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
942: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. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of supersight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empricism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
943: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. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
944:Gerade jetzt, wo ich drauf und dran bin den Nebel zu zerteilen, muß mir das Testmaterial ausgehen - und du rätst mir, mich wieder in blöde Benommenheit zurücksinken zu lassen! Mein Gott! Und unterdessen arbeitet wahrscheinlich irgend so ein gewissenloser Dieb mit meinen Daten und bereitet sich darauf vor, eher zu publizieren als ich und den Ruhm für meine Arbeit einzuheimsen. Ich werde um eine Nasenlänge verlieren - irgendein Narr, der genügend Testmaterial zur Verfügung hat, wird Sieger werden, obwohl ich, wenn ich nur halbwegs angemessene Arbeitsbedingungen hätte, schon in einer Woche mit fliegenden Fahnen durchs Ziel gehen könnte! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
945:It is no longer necessary to preach sonorously of the sinful and deleterious effect of liquor on the human mind and body; the essential evil is recognised scientifically, and only the sophistry of conscious immorality remains to be combated. Brewers and distillers still strive clumsily to delude the public by the transparent misstatements of their advertisements, and periodicals of easy conscience still permit these advertisements to disgrace their pages; but the end of such pernicious pretension is not remote. The drinker of yesterday flaunted his voice before all without shame; the average drinker of today must needs resort to excuses. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
946:El abismo era un caos hirviente de rosáceo y cerúleo esplendor; unas voces invisibles cantaban gozosas mientras el séquito de caballeros saltaba al vacío y descendía flotando graciosamente a través de las nubes luminosas y los plateados centelleos. Seguían flotando interminablemente los jinetes, y sus corceles pateaban el éter como si galopasen sobre doradas arenas; luego, los encendidos vapores se abrieron para revelar un resplandor aún más grande: el resplandor de la ciudad de Celefais, y la costa, más allá; y el pico que dominaba el mar, y las galeras de vivos colores que zarpan del puerto rumbo a lejanas regiones donde el cielo se junta con el mar. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
947:No hay en el mundo fortuna mayor, creo, que la incapacidad de la mente humana para relacionar entre sí todo lo que hay en ella. Vivimos en una isla de plácida ignorancia, rodeados por los negros mares de lo infinito, y no es nuestro destino emprender largos viajes. Las ciencias, que siguen sus caminos propios, no han provocado mucho daño hasta ahora; pero algún día la unión de esos disasociados conocimientos nos abrirá a la realidad, y a la endeble posición que en ella ocupamos, perspectivas tan espantosas que enloqueceremos ante la revelación, o huiremos de esa funesta luz, refugiándonos en la seguridad y la paz de una nueva edad de las tinieblas (...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
948:His solid flesh had never been away,
For each dawn found him in his usual place,
But every night his spirit loved to race
Through gulfs and worlds remote from common day.
He had seen Yaddith, yet retained his mind,
And come back safely from the Ghooric zone,
When one still night across curved space was thrown
That beckoning piping from the voids behind.
He waked that morning as an older man,
And nothing since has looked the same to him.
Objects around float nebulous and dim—
False, phantom trifles of some vaster plan.
His folk and friends are now an alien throng
To which he struggles vainly to belong. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
949:John Whately lived about a mile from town,
Up where the hills began to huddle thick;
We never thought his wits were very quick,
Seeing the way he let his farm run down.
He used to waste his time on some queer books
He'd found around the attic of his place,
Till funny lines got creased into his face,
And folks all said they didn't like his looks.
When he began those night-howls we declared
He'd better be locked up away from harm,
So three men from the Aylesbury town farm
Went for him - but came back alone and scared.
They'd found him talking to two crouching things
That at their step flew off on great black wings. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
950:The social prestige of wine at table and at the club must be destroyed through lofty example and polite ridicule; forces which are not always available, and for whose successful operation much time will be required. But the outstanding fact remains, that the world has come to regard liquor in a new and clearer light. Our next generation of poets will contain but few Anacreons, for the thinking element of mankind has robbed the flowing bowl of its fancied virtues and fictitious beauties. The grape, so long permitted to masquerade as the inspirer of wit and art, is now revealed as the mother of ruin and death. The wolf at last stands divested of its sheep’s clothing. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
951:I saw it from that hidden, silent place
Where the old wood half shuts the meadow in.
It shone through all the sunset's glories - thin
At first, but with a slowly brightening face.
Night came, and that lone beacon, amber-hued,
Beat on my sight as never it did of old;
The evening star - but grown a thousandfold
More haunting in this hush and solitude.
It traced strange pictures on the quivering air -
Half-memories that had always filled my eyes -
Vast towers and gardens; curious seas and skies
Of some dim life - I never could tell where.
But I knew that through the cosmic dome
Those rays were calling from my far, lost home. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
952:The winter sunset, flaming beyond spires
And chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,
Opens great gates to some forgotten year
Of elder splendours and divine desires.
Expectant wonders burn in those rich fires,
Adventure-fraught, and not untinged with fear;
A row of sphinxes where the way leads clear
Toward walls and turrets quivering to far lyres.
It is the land where beauty's meaning flowers,
Where every unplaced memory has a source,
Where the great river Time begins its course
Down the vast void in starlit streams of hours.
Dreams bring us close - but ancient lore repeats
That human tread has never soiled these streets. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
953:And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea. Upon ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
954:And as I ran along the shore, crushing sleeping flowers with heedless feet and maddened ever by the fear of unknown things and the lure of the dead faces, I saw that the garden had no end under that moon; for where by day the walls were, there stretched now only new vistas of trees and paths, flowers and shrubs, stone idols and pagodas, and bendings of the yellow-litten stream past grassy banks and under grotesque bridges of marble. And the lips of the dead lotos-faces whispered sadly, and bade me follow, nor did I cease my steps till the stream became a river, and joined amidst marshes of swaying reeds and beaches of gleaming sand the shore of a vast and nameless sea. Upon ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
955:It is not a true civilization, and has nothing in it to satisfy a mature and fully developed human mind. It is attuned to the mentality of the galley-slave and the moron, and crushes relentlessly with disapproval, ridicule, and economic annihilation any sign of actually independent thought and civilised feeling whith chances to rise above its sodden level. It is a treadmill, squirrel-trap culture – drugged and frenzied with the hashish of industrial servitude and material luxury. It is wholly a material body-culture, and its symbol is the tiled bathroom and steam radiator rather than the Doric portico and the temple of philosophy. Its denizens do not live or know how to live. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
956:One night I had a frightful dream in which I met my grandmother under the sea. She lived in a phosphorescent palace of many terraces, with gardens of strange leprous corals and grotesque brachiate efflorescences, and welcomed me with a warmth that may have been sardonic. She had changed - as those who take to the water change - and told me she had never died. Instead, she had gone to a spot her dead son had learned about, and had leaped to a realm whose wonders - destined for him as well - he had spurned with a smoking pistol. This was to be my realm, too - I could not escape it. I would never die, but would live with those who had lived since before man ever walked the earth. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
957: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. After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher's window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
958:As we gazed upon the uncanny sight presented to our vision, the thick lips opened, and several sounds issued from them, after which the thing relaxed in death. The guide clutched my coat sleeve and trembled so violently that the light shook fitfully, casting weird moving shadows on the walls. I made no motion, but stood rigidly still, my horrified eyes fixed upon the floor ahead. The fear left, and wonder, awe, compassion, and reverence succeeded in its place, for the sounds uttered by the stricken figure that lay stretched out on the limestone had told us the awesome truth. The creature I had killed, the strange beast of the unfathomed cave, was, or had at one time been a MAN!!! ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
959:The Silver Key:
I.
In the first days
of his bondage
he had turned
to the gentle churchly
faith endeared to him
by the naive
trust of his fathers,
for thence stretched
mystic avenues
which seemed to promise
escape from life.
II.
Only on closer view
did he mark the starved
fancy and beauty, the
stale and prosy
triteness, and the
owlish gravity
and grotesque
claims of solid truth
which reigned bore somely
and overwhelmingly
among most
of its professors;
or feel
to the full
the awkwardness
with which
it sought to keep
alive as literal
fact the outgrown
fears and guesses
of a primal
race confronting ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
960:From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
961:Die größte Gnade auf dieser Welt ist, so scheint es mir, das Nichtvermögen des menschlichen Geistes, all ihre inneren Geschehnisse miteinander in Verbindung zu bringen. Wir leben auf einem friedlichen Eiland des Ungewissens inmitten schwarzer Meere der Unendlichkeit, und es ist uns nicht bestimmt, diese weit zu bereisen. Die Wissenschaften - deren jede in eine eigene Richtung zielt - haben uns bis jetzt wenig gekümmert; aber eines Tages wird das Zusammenfügen der einzelnen Erkenntnisse so erschreckende Aspekte der Wirklichkeit eröffnen, dass wir durch diese Enthüllung entweder dem Wahnsinn verfallen oder uns aus dem tödlichen Licht in den Frieden und die Sicherheit eines neuen, dunklen Zeitalters fliehen werden. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
962:Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
963:Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined corridors of purple fulgurous sky . . . formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous overnourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion . . . insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and daemon arcades choked with fungous vegetation. . . . Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
964:Tampoco debe pensarse (...) que el hombre es el másantiguo o el último de los dueños de la Tierra, ni que semejante combinación de cuerpo y alma se pasea sola por el universo. Los Ancianos eran, Los Ancianos son y los Ancianos serán. No en los espacios que conocemos, sino entre ellos. Se pasean serenos y primigenios en esencia, sin dimensiones e invisibles a nuestra vista (...) Los hombres perciben a veces su presencia por el olor que despiden, pero ningún ser humano puede ver su semblante, salvo únicamente a través de las facciones de los hombres engendrados por Ellos, y son de las más diversas especies, difiriendo en apariencia desde las mismísima imagen del hombre hasta figuras invisibles o sin sustancia que son Ellos(...) ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
965:Tales of ordinary characters would appeal to a larger class , but I have no wish to make such an appeal . The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me , for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author's perspective . There are probably seven persons in all , who really like my work and they are enough . I should write even if I were the only patient reader , for my aim is merely self expression . I could not write about ' ordinary people ' because I am not in the least interested in them . Without interest there can be no art . Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy . It is man's relations to the cosmos - to the unknown - which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination . ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
966:Isompi ko lato... täynnä kiemurtelevia köysijä... olento on kokonaisuuvessaan vähän niinkö kananmunan muotoinen ja isompi ko mikkään mitä oon eläissäni nähäny, ja sillä on kymmenittäin sianpään kokosia jalakoja jokka sulkeutuvat puolittain sen astuvessa... siinä ei oo mittään kiintiää - ihanko hillova koko otus ja täynnä erillisiä, luikertelevia köysijä jokka on lähellä toisiaan... suuria, mulukosilimiä joka puolella... kymmene tai kakskymmentä suuta tai kärsää pistää essiin joka puolelta sen kylijistä, yhtä isoja ko savupiiput ja heiluvat ja avautuvat ja sulukeutuvat koko ajan - kaikki harmaita ja niissä on jonkinlaisia sinisiä tai purppuranpunaisia renkuloita... Ja Luoja siunakkoon taivaassa - sillä on kasvot siellä yläpuolella... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
967:The Lurking Fear:
Shrieking, slithering, torrential shadows of red viscous madness chasing one another through endless, ensanguined condors of purple fulgurous sky... formless phantasms and kaleidoscopic mutations of a ghoulish, remembered scene; forests of monstrous over-nourished oaks with serpent roots twisting and sucking unnamable juices from an earth verminous with millions of cannibal devils; mound-like tentacles groping from underground nuclei of polypous perversion... insane lightning over malignant ivied walls and demon arcades choked with fungous vegetation... Heaven be thanked for the instinct which led me unconscious to places where men dwell; to the peaceful village that slept under the calm stars of clearing skies. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
968:There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold, vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable depths. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men's calandars the tides of far spheres that bore him gently to join the course of other cycles that tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore, a green shore fragrant with lotus blossums and starred by red camalates... ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
969:They worshipped, so they said, 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; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R’lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
970:There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we learn and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
971:There were, in such voyages, incalculable local dangers; as well as that shocking final peril which gibbers unmentionably outside the ordered universe, where no dreams reach; that last amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the centre of all infinity—the boundless daemon-sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin, monotonous whine of accursed flutes; to which detestable pounding and piping dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic ultimate gods, the blind, voiceless, tenebrous, mindless Other Gods whose soul and messenger is the crawling chaos Nyarlathotep. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
972:There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
973:Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. For them are the catacombs of Ptolemais, and the carven mausolea of the nightmare countries. They climb to the moonlit towers of ruined Rhine castles, and falter down black cobwebbed steps beneath the scattered stones of forgotten cities in Asia. The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines, and they linger around the sinister monoliths on uninhabited islands. But the true epicure in the terrible, to whom a new thrill of unutterable ghastliness is the chief end and justification of existence, esteems most of all the ancient, lonely farmhouses of backwoods New England; for there the dark elements of strength, solitude, grotesqueness, and ignorance combine to form the perfection of the hideous. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
974:What do we know,” he had said, “of the world and the universe about us? Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with a wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have. I have always believed that such strange, inaccessible worlds exist at our very elbows, and now I believe I have found a way to break down the barriers. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
975:High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the invader. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
976:Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape—-the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
977:It was murder - strangulation - but one need not say that the claw-mark on Mrs. Suydam's throat could not have come from her husband's or any other human hand, or that upon the white wall there flickered for an instant in hateful red a legend which, later copied from memory, seems to have been nothing less than the fearsome Chaldee letters of the word 'LILITH'. One need not mention these things because they vanished so quickly - as for Suydam, one could at least bar others from the room until one knew what to think oneself. The doctor has distinctly assured Malone that he did not see IT. The open porthole, just before he turned on the lights, was clouded for a second with a certain phosphorescence, and for a moment there seemed to echo in the night outside the suggestion of a faint and hellish tittering; ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
978:His pretence to profound and obscure scholarship, his blundering ventures in stilted and laboured pseudo-humour, and his often vitriolic outbursts of critical prejudice must all be recognised and forgiven. Beyond and above them, and dwarfing them to insignificance, was a master’s vision of the terror that stalks about and within us, and the worm that writhes and slavers in the hideously close abyss. Penetrating to every festering horror in the gaily painted mockery called existence, and in the solemn masquerade called human thought and feelings that vision had power to project itself in blackly magical crystallisations and transmutations; till there bloomed in the sterile America of the ’thirties and ’forties such a moon-nourished garden of gorgeous poison fungi as not even the nether slope of Saturn might boast. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
979: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 victim’s 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. After a while, as the days of waking became less and less bearable from their greyness and sameness, I would often drift in opiate peace through the valley and the shadowy groves, and wonder how I might seize them for my eternal dwelling-place, so that I need no more crawl back to a dull world stript of interest and new colours... 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, #NFDB
980:When a traveller in north central Massachusetts takes the wrong fork at the junction of the Aylesbury pike just beyond Dean’s Corners he comes upon a lonely and curious country. The ground gets higher, and the brier-bordered stone walls press closer and closer against the ruts of the dusty, curving road. The trees of the frequent forest belts seem too large, and the wild weeds, brambles, and grasses attain a luxuriance not often found in settled regions. At the same time the planted fields appear singularly few and barren; while the sparsely scattered houses wear a surprisingly uniform aspect of age, squalor, and dilapidation. Without knowing why, one hesitates to ask directions from the gnarled, solitary figures spied now and then on crumbling doorsteps or on the sloping, rock-strown meadows. Those figures are so silent ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
981:A sickened, sensitive shadow writhing in hands that are not hands, and whirled blindly past ghastly midnights of rotting creation, corpses of dead worlds with sores that were cities, charnel winds that brush the pallid stars and make them flicker low. Beyond the worlds vague ghosts of monstrous things; half-seen columns of unsanctified temples that rest on nameless rocks beneath space and reach up to dizzy vacua above the spheres of light and darkness. And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled, maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless, mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
982: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. 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. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
983:It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
984:A despatch from California describes a theosophist colony as donning white robes en masse for some “glorious fulfilment” which never arrives, whilst items from India speak guardedly of serious native unrest toward the end of March. Voodoo orgies multiply in Hayti, and African outposts report ominous mutterings. American officers in the Philippines find certain tribes bothersome about this time, and New York policemen are mobbed by hysterical Levantines on the night of March 22–23. The west of Ireland, too, is full of wild rumour and legendry, and a fantastic painter named Ardois-Bonnot hangs a blasphemous “Dream Landscape” in the Paris spring salon of 1926. And so numerous are the recorded troubles in insane asylums, that only a miracle can have stopped the medical fraternity from noting strange parallelisms and drawing mystified conclusions. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
985:We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honourable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
986:Penso che il destino degli uomini sarebbe ancora più crudele di quanto già sia, se la nostra mente non fosse incapace di mettere in rapporto tra loro tutte le cose che avvengono in questo mondo. La nostra vita si svolge nei confini di una pacifica isola di ignoranza, circondata dagli oscuri mari dell'infinito, e non credo che ci convenga spingerci troppo lontano da essa. Finora le scienze, progredendo passo passo nel campo d'azione proprio a ciascuna, non ci hanno arrecato troppo danno: ma un giorno o l'altro, quando infine si riuniranno le varie parti del sapere, oggi ancora sparse qua e là, si presenterà ai nostri occhi una visione talmente terrificante della realtà e della terribile parte che noi abbiamo in essa, che se non impazziremo dinanzi a una simile rivelazione, tenteremo di fuggire quella vista mortale rifugiandoci nell'oscurità di un nuovo medioevo. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
987: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. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was not frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginnings of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgement to my readers when they shall have learnt all. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
988:But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean. Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. All my days have I watched it and listened to it, and I know it well. At first it told to me only the plain little tales of calm beaches and near ports, but with the years it grew more friendly and spoke of other things; of things more strange and more distant in space and in time. Sometimes at twilight the grey vapours of the horizon have parted to grant me glimpses of the ways beyond; and sometimes at night the deep waters of the sea have grown clear and phosphorescent, to grant me glimpses of the ways beneath. 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, #NFDB
989:A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
990:A certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present; and there must be a hint, expressed with a seriousness and portentousness becoming its subject, of that most terrible conception of the human brain - a malign and particular suspension or defeat of those laws of Nature which are our only safeguard against the assaults of chaos and the daemons of unplumbed space .... Therefore we must judge a weird tale not by the author's intent, or by the mere mechanics of the plot; but by the emotional level which it attains at its least mundane point... The one test of the really weird is simply this - whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
991:I do not recall distinctly when it began, but it was months ago. The general tension was horrible. To a season of political and social upheaval was added a strange and brooding apprehension of hideous physical danger; a danger widespread and all-embracing, such a danger as may be imagined only in the most terrible phantasms of the night. I recall that the people went about with pale and worried faces, and whispered warnings and prophecies which no one dared consciously repeat or acknowledge to himself that he had heard. A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places. There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons—the autumn heat lingered fearsomely, and everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
992:When there is an autocracy, we may be sure that the masses will some day overthrow it; and when there is a democracy or ochlocracy, we may be sure that some group of mentally and physically superior individuals will some day overthrow it by establishing a more or less enduring (but never wholly permanent) supremacy, either through judgment in playing men against each other, or through patience and ability in concentrating power by taking advantage of the indolence of the majority. In a word, the social organisation of humanity is in a state of perpetually and incurably unstable equilibrium.
I believe in an aristocracy, because I deem it the only agency for the creation of those refinements which make life endurable for the human animal of high organisation.
In an aristocracy some persons have a great deal to live for. In a democracy most persons have a little to live for. In an ochlocracy nobody has anything to live for. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
993:So, Randolph Carter, in the name of the Other Gods I spare you and charge you to serve my will. I charge you to seek that sunset city which is yours, and to send thence the drowsy truant gods for whom the dream-world waits. Not hard to find is that roseal fever of the gods, that fanfare of supernal trumpets and clash of immortal cymbals, that mystery whose place and meaning have haunted you through the halls of waking and the gulfs of dreaming, and tormented you with hints of vanished memory and the pain of lost things awesome and momentous. Not hard to find is that symbol and relic of your days of wonder, for truly, it is but the stable and eternal gem wherein all that wonder sparkles crystallised to light your evening path. Behold! It is not over unknown seas but back over well-known years that your quest must go; back to the bright strange things of infancy and the quick sun-drenched glimpses of magic that old scenes brought to wide young eyes. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
994:As for the Republicans -- how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'...) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
995: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. The enigmas of the symbolists and the ecstasies of the pre-Raphaelites all were ours in their time, but each new mood was drained too soon, of its diverting novelty and appeal. Only the somber philosophy of the decadents could help us, and this we found potent only by increasing gradually the depth and diablism of our penetrations. Baudelaire and Huysmans were soon exhausted of thrills, till finally there remained for us only the more direct stimuli of unnatural personal experiences and adventures. It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity--that hideous extremity of human outrage, the abhorred practice of grave-robbing. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
996:Gradually and mistily it became apparent that the Most Ancient One was holding something—some object clutched in the outflung folds of his robe as if for the sight, or what answered for sight, of the cloaked Companions. It was a large sphere or apparent sphere of some obscurely iridescent metal, and as the Guide put it forward a low, pervasive half-impression of sound began to rise and fall in intervals which seemed to be rhythmic even though they followed no rhythm of earth. There was a suggestion of chanting—or what human imagination might interpret as chanting. Presently the quasi-sphere began to grow luminous, and as it gleamed up into a cold, pulsating light of unassignable colour Carter saw that its flickerings conformed to the alien rhythm of the chant. Then all the mitred, sceptre-bearing Shapes on the pedestals commenced a slight, curious swaying in the same inexplicable rhythm, while nimbuses of unclassifiable light—resembling that of the quasi-sphere—played round their shrouded heads ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
997:I beheld such a sight which I have never beheld before, and which no living person can have seen save in the delirium of fever or the inferno of opium. The building stood on a narrow point of land- or what was now a narrow point of land-fully three hundred feet above what must lately have been a seething vortex of mad waters. On either side of the house there fell a newly washed-out precipice of red earth, whilst ahead of me the hideous waves were still rolling in frightfully, eating away the land with ghastly monotony and deliberation. Out a mile or more there rose and feel menacing breakers of at least fifty feat in height, and on the far horizon ghoulish black clouds were resting and brooding like unwholesome vultures. The waves were dark and purplish, almost black, and clutched at the yielding red mud of the bank as if with uncouth, greedy hands. I could not but feel that some noxious marine mind had declared a war of extermination upon all the solid ground, perhaps abetted by the angry sky. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
998:He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped his thoughts and fancies. Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other. Custom had dinned into his ears a superstitious reverence for that which tangibly and physically exists, and had made him secretly ashamed to dwell in visions. Wise men told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist in fancying them full of meaning and purpose as 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, #NFDB
999:By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea once a year in a golden palanquin to pray to the god of Oukranos, who sang to him in youth when he dwelt in a cottage by its banks. All of jasper is that temple, and covering an acre of ground with its walls and courts, its seven pinnacled towers, and its inner shrine where the river enters through hidden channels and the god sings softly in the night. Many times the moon hears strange music as it shines on those courts and terraces and pinnacles, but whether that music be the song of the god or the chant of the cryptical priests, none but the King of Ilek-Vad may say; for only he had entered the temple or seen the priests. Now, in the drowsiness of day, that carven and delicate fane was silent, and Carter heard only the murmur of the great stream and the hum of the birds and bees as he walked onward under the enchanted sun. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1000:It is at night, especially when the moon is gibbous and waning, that I see the thing. I tried morphine; but the drug has given only transient surcease, and has drawn me into its clutches as a hopeless slave. So now I am to end it all, having written a full account for the information or the contemptuous amusement of my fellow-men. Often I ask myself if it could not all have been a pure phantasm—a mere freak of fever as I lay sun-stricken and raving in the open boat after my escape from the German man-of-war. This I ask myself, but ever does there come before me a hideously vivid vision in reply. I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering at the nameless things that may at this very moment be crawling and floundering on its slimy bed, worshipping their ancient stone idols and carving their own detestable likenesses on submarine obelisks of water-soaked granite. I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1001:And now at last the Earth was dead. The final pitiful survivor had perished. All the teeming billions; the slow aeons; the empires and civilizations of mankind were summed up in this poor twisted form—and how titanically meaningless it had all been! Now indeed had come an end and climax to all the efforts of humanity—how monstrous and incredible a climax in the eyes of those poor complacent fools in the prosperous days! Not ever again would the planet know the thunderous tramping of human millions—or even the crawling of lizards and the buzz of insects, for they, too, had gone. Now was come the reign of sapless branches and endless fields of tough grasses. Earth, like its cold, imperturbable moon, was given over to silence and blackness forever. The stars whirled on; the whole careless plan would continue for infinities unknown. This trivial end of a negligible episode mattered not to distant nebulae or to suns newborn, flourishing, and dying. The race of man, too puny and momentary to have a real function or purpose, was as if it had never existed. To such a conclusion the aeons of its farcically toilsome evolution had led. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1002: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. Daily life had for him come to be a phantasmagoria of macabre shadow-studies; now glittering and leering with concealed rottenness as in Beardsley's best manner, now hinting terrors behind the commonest shapes and objects as in the subtler and less obvious work of Gustave Dore. He would often regard it as merciful that most persons of high Intelligence jeer at the inmost mysteries; for, he argued, if superior minds were ever placed in fullest contact with the secrets preserved by ancient and lowly cults, the resultant abnormalities would soon not only wreck the world, but threaten the very integrity of the universe. All this reflection was no doubt morbid, but keen logic and a deep sense of humour ably offset it. Malone was satisfied to let his notions remain as half-spied and forbidden visions to be lightly played with; and hysteria came only when duty flung him into a hell of revelation too sudden and insidious to escape. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1003:Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the marvelous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, and was stopped by a red-robed sentry till he had told three dreams beyond belief, and proved himself a dreamer worthy to walk up Thran's steep mysterious streets and linger in the bazaars where the wares of the ornate galleons were sold. Then into that incredible city he walked; through a wall so thick that the gate was a tunnel, and thereafter amidst curved and undulant ways winding deep and narrow between the heavenward towers. Lights shone through grated and balconied windows, and, the sound of lutes and pipes stole timid from inner courts where marble fountains bubbled. Carter knew his way, and edged down through darker streets to the river, where at an old sea tavern he found the captains and seamen he had known in myriad other dreams. There he bought his passage to Celephais on a great green galleon, and there he stopped for the night after speaking gravely to the venerable cat of that inn, who blinked dozing before an enormous hearth and dreamed of old wars and forgotten gods. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1004:Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and stumbles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because someone else wants something, so do superior people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes a stimulus to his self importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect -- the calm mastery of a being whose life is its own and not yours -- and the superior person recognises and appreciates this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own heritage and aesthetic sense. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1005:March 1st—our February 28th according to the International Date Line—the earthquake and storm had come. From Dunedin the Alert and her noisome crew had darted eagerly forth as if imperiously summoned, and on the other side of the earth poets and artists had begun to dream of a strange, dank Cyclopean city whilst a young sculptor had moulded in his sleep the form of the dreaded Cthulhu. March 23d the crew of the Emma landed on an unknown island and left six men dead; and on that date the dreams of sensitive men assumed a heightened vividness and darkened with dread of a giant monster’s malign pursuit, whilst an architect had gone mad and a sculptor had lapsed suddenly into delirium! And what of this storm of April 2nd—the date on which all dreams of the dank city ceased, and Wilcox emerged unharmed from the bondage of strange fever? What of all this—and of those hints of old Castro about the sunken, star-born Old Ones and their coming reign; their faithful cult and their mastery of dreams? Was I tottering on the brink of cosmic horrors beyond man’s power to bear? If so, they must be horrors of the mind alone, for in some way the second of April had put a stop to whatever monstrous menace had begun its siege of mankind’s soul. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1006:I have often 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. Whilst the greater number of our nocturnal visions are perhaps no more than faint and fantastic reflections of our waking experiences—Freud to the contrary with his puerile symbolism—there are still a certain remainder whose immundane and ethereal character permit of no ordinary interpretation, and whose vaguely exciting and disquieting effect suggests possible minute glimpses into a sphere of mental existence no less important than physical life, yet separated from that life by an all but impassable barrier. From my experience I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know, and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. From those blurred and fragmentary memories we may infer much, yet prove little. We may guess that in dreams life, matter, and vitality, as the earth knows such things, are not necessarily constant; and that time and space do not exist as our waking selves comprehend them. Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1007:Con frecuencia me he preguntado si el común de los mortales se habrá parado alguna vez a considerar la enorme importancia de ciertos sueños, así como a pensar acerca del oscuro mundo al que pertenecen. Aunque la mayoría de nuestras visiones nocturnas resultan quizás poco más que débiles y fantásticos reflejos de nuestras experiencias de vigilia —a pesar de Freud y su pueril simbolismo—, existen no obstante algunos sueños cuyo carácter etéreo y no mundano no permite una interpretación ordinaria y cuyos efectos vagamente excitantes e inquietantes sugieren posibles ojeadas fugaces a una esfera de existencia mental no menos importante que la vida física, aunque separada de esta por una barrera infranqueable. Mi experiencia no me permite dudar que el hombre, al perder su consciencia terrena, se ve de hecho albergado en otra vida incorpórea, de naturaleza distinta y alejada de la existencia que conocemos y de la que solo los recuerdos más leves y difusos se conservan tras el despertar. De estas memorias turbias y fragmentarias es mucho lo que podemos deducir, aun cuando probar bien poco. Podemos suponer que en la vida onírica, la materia y la vida, tal como se conocen tales cosas en la tierra, no resultan necesariamente constantes y que el tiempo y el espacio no existen tal como lo entienden nuestros cuerpos de vigilia. A veces creo que esta vida menos material es nuestra existencia real y que nuestra vana estancia sobre el globo terráqueo resulta en sí misma un fenómeno secundario meramente virtual. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1008:Cuando el que viaja por el norte de la región central de Massachusetts se equivoca de dirección al llegar al cruce de la carretera de Aylesbury nada más pasar Dean’s Corners, verá que se adentra en una extraña y apenas poblada comarca. El terreno se hace más escarpado y las paredes de piedra cubiertas de maleza van encajonando cada vez más el sinuoso camino de tierra. Los árboles de los bosques son allí de unas dimensiones excesivamente grandes, y la maleza, las zarzas y la hierba alcanzan una frondosidad rara vez vista en las regiones habitadas. Por el contrario, los campos cultivados son muy escasos y áridos, mientras que las pocas casas diseminadas a lo largo del camino presentan un sorprendente aspecto uniforme de decrepitud, suciedad y ruina. Sin saber exactamente por qué, uno no se atreve a preguntar nada a las arrugadas y solitarias figuras que, de cuando en cuando, se ve escrutar desde puertas medio derruidas o desde pendientes y rocosos prados. Esas gentes son tan silenciosas y hurañas que uno tiene la impresión de verse frente a un recóndito enigma del que más vale no intentar averiguar nada. Y ese sentimiento de extraño desasosiego se recrudece cuando, desde un alto del camino, se divisan las montañas que se alzan por encima de los tupidos bosques que cubren la comarca. Las cumbres tienen una forma demasiado ovalada y simétrica como para pensar en una naturaleza apacible y normal, y a veces pueden verse recortados con singular nitidez contra el cielo unos extraños círculos formados por altas columnas de piedra que coronan la mayoría de las cimas montañosas. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1009:Even yet I do not know why the ocean holds such a fascination for me. But then, perhaps none of us can solve those things—they exist in defiance of all explanation. There are men, and wise men, who do not like the sea and its lapping surf on yellow shores; and they think us strange who love the mystery of the ancient and unending deep. Yet for me there is a haunting and inscrutable glamour in all the ocean's moods. It is in the melancholy silver foam beneath the moon's waxen corpse; it hovers over the silent and eternal waves that beat on naked shores; it is there when all is lifeless save for unknown shapes that glide through sombre depths. And when I behold the awesome billows surging in endless strength, there comes upon me an ecstasy akin to fear; so that I must abase myself before this mightiness, that I may not hate the clotted waters and their overwhelming beauty. Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters. And these shall beat on dark shores in thunderous foam, though none shall remain in that dying world to watch the cold light of the enfeebled moon playing on the swirling tides and coarse-grained sand. On the deep's margin shall rest only a stagnant foam, gathering about the shells and bones of perished shapes that dwelt within the waters. Silent, flabby things will toss and roll along empty shores, their sluggish life extinct. Then all shall be dark, for at last even the white moon on the distant waves shall wink out. Nothing shall be left, neither above nor below the sombre waters. And until that last millennium, and beyond the perishing of all other things, the sea will thunder and toss throughout the dismal night. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1010:And even in the open air the stench of whiskey was appalling. To this fiendish poison, I am certain, the greater part of the squalor I saw is due. Many of these vermin were obviously not foreigners—I counted at least five American countenances in which a certain vanished decency half showed through the red whiskey bloating. Then I reflected upon the power of wine, and marveled how self-respecting persons can imbibe such stuff, or permit it to be served upon their tables. It is the deadliest enemy with which humanity is faced. Not all the European wars could produce a tenth of the havock occasioned among men by the wretched fluid which responsible governments allow to be sold openly. Looking upon that mob of sodden brutes, my mind’s eye pictured a scene of different kind; a table bedecked with spotless linen and glistening silver, surrounded by gentlemen immaculate in evening attire—and in the reddening faces of those gentlemen I could trace the same lines which appeared in full development of the beasts of the crowd. Truly, the effects of liquor are universal, and the shamelessness of man unbounded. How can reform be wrought in the crowd, when supposedly respectable boards groan beneath the goblets of rare old vintages? Is mankind asleep, that its enemy is thus entertained as a bosom friend? But a week or two ago, at a parade held in honour of the returning Rhode Island National Guard, the Chief Executive of this State, Mr. Robert Livingston Beeckman, prominent in New York, Newport, and Providence society, appeared in such an intoxicated condition that he could scarce guide his mount, or retain his seat in the saddle, and he the guardian of the liberties and interests of that Colony carved by the faith, hope, and labour of Roger Williams from the wilderness of savage New-England! I am perhaps an extremist on the subject of prohibition, but I can see no justification whatsoever for the tolerance of such a degrading demon as drink. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1011:Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view. Wild and “different” as they may consider their quasi-weird products, it remains a fact that the bizarrerie is on the surface alone; and that basically they reiterate the same old conventional values and motives and perspectives. Good and evil, teleological illusion, sugary sentiment, anthropocentric psychology—the usual superficial stock in trade, and all shot through with the eternal and inescapable commonplace…. Who ever wrote a story from the point of view that man is a blemish on the cosmos, who ought to be eradicated? As an example—a young man I know lately told me that he means to write a story about a scientist who wishes to dominate the earth, and who to accomplish his ends trains and overdevelops germs … and leads armies of them in the manner of the Egyptian plagues. I told him that although this theme has promise, it is made utterly commonplace by assigning the scientist a normal motive. There is nothing outré about wanting to conquer the earth; Alexander, Napoleon, and Wilhelm II wanted to do that. Instead, I told my friend, he should conceive a man with a morbid, frantic, shuddering hatred of the life-principle itself, who wishes to extirpate from the planet every trace of biological organism, animal and vegetable alike, including himself. That would be tolerably original. But after all, originality lies with the author. One can’t write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses theme and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. 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, #NFDB
1012:Tampoco hay que creer que el hombre es el más antiguo o el último de los amos de la tierra, o que esa combinación de vida y sustancia discurre sola por el universo. Los Grandes Antiguos eran, los Grandes Antiguos son, y los Grandes Antiguos serán. No conocemos nada del espacio sino por intermedio de ellos. Caminan serenos y primordiales, sin dimensiones e invisibles para nosotros. Yog-Sothoth es la puerta. Yog-Sothoth es la llave y el guardián de la puerta. Pasado, presente y futuro, todo es uno en Yog-Sothoth. Él sabe por dónde entraron los Grandes Antiguos en el pasado,y por dónde volverán a irrumpir otra vez. Sabe dónde Ellos han hollado los campos de la Tierra, dónde los siguen hollando, y por qué nadie puede contemplarlos mientras lo hacen. A veces el hombre puede saber que están cerca por Su olor, pero ningún hombre puede conocer Su semblante, salvo en los rasgos de los hombres engendrados por Ellos,y los hay de muchos tipos, distinguiéndose en apariencia de la auténtica forma humana hasta la forma sin imagen ni sustancia que es la de Ellos. Caminan invisibles y hediondos en lugares solitarios donde las Palabras han sido pronunciadas y los Ritos han sido aullados en las Estaciones apropiadas. El viento gime con Sus voces, y la tierra murmura con Su voluntad. Abaten los bosques y destruyen ciudades, aunque ningún bosque o ciudad advierte la mano que los aniquila. Kadath, en el páramo helado los ha conocido; pero, ¿qué hombre conoce a Kadath? El desierto helado del Sur y las islas sumergidas del océano conservan piedras donde puede verse Su sello, pero ¿quién ha visto la helada ciudad hundida o la torre sellada engalanada con algas y percebes? El Gran Cthulhu es Su primo, aunque apenas puede entreverlos débilmente.¡Iä! ¡Shub-Niggurath! Por su olor inmundo Los conoceréis. Su mano está en vuestras gargantas, aunque no Los veáis, y Su morada se encuentra en el umbral que custodiáis. Yog-Sothoth es la llave que abre la puerta, el lugar donde se reúnen las esferas. ahora el hombre reina donde Ellos reinaron antes; pronto Ellos reinarán donde el hombre reina ahora. Después del verano viene el invierno; después del invierno, el verano. Ellos esperan pacientes y poderosos, porque volverán a reinar aquí. ~ H P Lovecraft, #NFDB
1013:Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
Ambiguous use of pronouns.
Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
1014:Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles.
At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors. Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye. Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth like projections - probably mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness.
At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement. Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter at base to about two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old. From inner angles of starfish-arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from three inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips. All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded over pseudoneck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end. ~ H P Lovecraft,#NFDB
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