Hp Lovecraft Book Quotes

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.

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.

I had evoked - and the book was indeed all I had suspected.

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.

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.

see, now, that it was wrong for me to curse your particular blood to a diseased eternity of suffering. In an attempt at magnanimity I extend an apology and retract my sanguinary execration.

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.

all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead,

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone.

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.

From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came,

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

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.

the daemoniac rattle and wheeze of a blasphemous organ, choking and rumbling out the mockeries of hell in a cracked, sardonic bass.

I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds,

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.

This man, a vagabond, hunter, and trapper, had always been strange in the eyes of his primitive associates.

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.

shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch

that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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”.

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.

Mr. Hoadley disappeared soon after delivering this sermon; but the text, printed in Springfield, is still extant.

when I glanced at the moon it seemed to quiver as though mirrored in unquiet waters.

My fear again waned low, since a natural phenomenon tends to dispel broodings over the unknown.

From a private hospital for the insane near Providence, Rhode Island, there recently disappeared an exceedingly singular person.

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.

he never spoke save in the debased patois of his environment;

Still, it’s a nice, cynical book for those who like atrocity scenes—starving prisoners forced to eat their girlfriends, etc.

we all come from onct—Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn—

Who knows the end? What

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?

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.

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.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

It is only in the terrible phantasms of drugs or delirium that any other man can have such a descent as mine.

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.

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

With Eyes Like Charles Manson, a life similar to H.P Lovecraft, and lyrics like Edgar Allan Poe, Kurt Cobain was the master of horror in music.

For he who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

my cries were lost in the hell-born babel of the howling wind-wraiths.

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

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth.” – H.P. Lovecraft

Hey, Bode, you want to not shine that thing in my face.." (Lovecraft 117). This quote was said by Kinsey after seeing a flash light hit in her eyes. This was before she realize that it was actually Sam who was pointing the light at her. After that immediately, she was hit in the face by Sam. This happened near the end of the book when Sam was breaking into the house and trying to steal the keys from the Lockes.

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.

Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream. It

Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly,

Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.

Instead of Freud's famous Interpretation of Dreams it is a book of dreams that interprets us.

I tell you, sir, that the end of the world has come. No one has ever beheld such outbreaks among the students! It is the accursed inventions of this century that are ruining everything — artilleries, bombards, and, above all, printing, that other German pest. No more manuscripts, no more books! printing will kill bookselling. It is the end of the world that is drawing nigh.

vanishingly

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

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

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

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

Old Cairo is itself a story-book and a dream--labyrinths of narrow alleys redolent of aromatic secrets;

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

It is man’s relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. . . . —H. P. LOVECRAFT2

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form. H.P. LOVECRAFT, Supernatural Horror in Literature

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed.

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

He who passes the gates always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone.

He who passes the gateways always wins a shadow, and never again can he be alone.

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;