H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible — though I know not in what proportion — still remains.

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

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 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.

You see them? You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you every 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 shewn you worlds that no other living men have seen?

West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.

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.

Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.

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.

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.

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.