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.

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.

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.

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.

Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.

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.

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.

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.