H. P. Lovecraft Quotes, Real Quotes, Writing Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Real Quotes , Writing Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Gentleman Quotes , Doe Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Law Quotes , Cosmos Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Clouds Quotes , Evil Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Book Quotes , Dark Quotes

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Justice Quotes , Noise Quotes

Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Void Quotes , Lasts Quotes

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.

5 years ago

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Law Quotes , Cosmos Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Eye Quotes , Idlers Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Dream Quotes , Memories Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Imagination Quotes , Everyday Quotes

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!

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Men Quotes , Doe Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Lying Quotes , Cat Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Real Quotes , Emotional Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Ignorance Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Attitude Quotes , Wings Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Space Quotes , Unseen Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Dream Quotes , Men Quotes

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?

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Men Quotes , Air Quotes

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.

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Tags : H. P. Lovecraft Quotes , Air Quotes , Self Quotes