β
The tattoo is just setting below his hp bone.
H e l l i s e m p t y
a n d a l l t h e d e v i l s a r e h e r e
I kiss my way across the words.
Kissing away the devils.
Kissing away the pain.
β
β
Tahereh Mafi (Ignite Me (Shatter Me, #3))
β
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature)
β
Pleasure to me is wonderβthe unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Tales of H.P. Lovecraft)
β
It is good to be a cynic β it is better to be a contented cat β and it is best not to exist at all.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany)
β
I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Outsider)
β
Never Explain Anything
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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..
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Temple)
β
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)
β
Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.
β
β
Michel Houellebecq (H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life)
β
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
I thought it sounded a bit like Percy singing... maybe you've got to attack him while he's in the shower, Harry.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Rats in the Walls)
β
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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...
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Pleasure to me is wonderβthe 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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming...
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Night Ocean et autres nouvelles)
β
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Dunwich Horror and Others)
β
In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories)
β
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Of course we still want to know you!" Harry said, staring at Hagrid.
"You don't think anything that Skeeter cow - sorry, Professor," he added quickly, looking at Dumbledore.
"I have gone temporarily deaf and haven't any idea what you said, Harry," said Dumbledore, twiddling his thumbs and staring at the ceiling.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Silver Key)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Do not be afraid of your difficulties.Do not wish you could be in other circumstances than you are. For when you have made the best of an adversity, it becomes the stepping stone to a splendid opportunity.
β
β
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
β
I like coffee exceedingly...
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Thing on the Doorstep)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Rats in the Walls)
β
Life is painful and disappointing. It is useless, therefore, to write new realistic novels. We generally know where we stand in relation to reality and donβt care to know any more.
β
β
Michel Houellebecq (H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life)
β
Let me out," Harry said again.
"No," Dumbledore repeated.
"If you don't - if you keep me in here - if you don't let me-"
"By all means continue destroying my possessions," said Dumbledore. "I daresay I have too many.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
β
Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (From Beyond)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Selected Letters III: 1929-1931)
β
Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises...
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)
β
Jason turned to Leo. βDo you think you can fly this thing?β
βUmβ¦β Leo put his hand on the side of the helicopter, concentrating hard, as if listening to the machine.
βBell 412HP utility helicopter,β Leo said. βComposite four-blade main rotor, cruising speed twenty-two knots, service ceiling twenty-thousand feet. The tank is near full. Sure, I can fly it.β
Piper smiled at the ranger again. βYou dinβt have a problem with an under-aged unlicensed kid borrowing your copter, do you? Weβll return it.β
βI-β The pilot nearly choked on the words, but she got them out: βI donβt have a problem with that.β
Leo grinned. βHop in kids, Uncle Leoβs gonna take you for a ride.
β
β
Rick Riordan (The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, #1))
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
incurable lover of the grotesque
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
β
β
null
β
I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Because - oh shut up laughing, you two - because they've just been turned down by girls they asked to the ball!
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, #4))
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)
β
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
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft)
β
The most merciful thing in the world... is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Hypnos)
β
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!
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Dagon et autres nouvelles de terreur)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Pickman's Model)
β
Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Case of Charles Dexter Ward)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Old Bugs)
β
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. . . .
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Thing on the Doorstep)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Sirius was a brave, clever, and energetic man, and such men are not usually content to sit at home in hiding while they believe others to be in danger.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalismβreligion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
The only thing separating Americans and Brits is a comman language.
β
β
H.P. Mallory (Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble (Underworld, #1))
β
Great holes secretly are digged where earthβs pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Festival)
β
It was just a colour out of spaceβa 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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Colour Out of Space and others)
β
We shall dive down through black abysses...and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Cats and Dogs)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror)
β
Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Fiction: Complete and Unabridged)
β
Why do you live?
Because I have something worth living for.
β
β
J.K. Rowling
β
I suspect Nargles are behind it.
β
β
J.K. Rowling
β
There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Colour Out of Space and others)
β
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (H.P. Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep)
β
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre)
β
We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Beyond the Wall of Sleep Complete Works)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (From Beyond / The Haunter of the Dark)
β
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Few beings have ever been so impregnated, pierced to the core, by the conviction of the absolute futility of human aspiration. The universe is nothing but a furtive arrangement of elementary particles. A figure in transition toward chaos. That is what will finally prevail. The human race will disappear. Other races in turn will appear and disappear. The skies will be glacial and empty, traversed by the feeble light of half-dead stars. These too will disappear. Everything will disappear. And human actions are as free and as stripped of meaning as the unfettered movements of the elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, sentiments? Pure βVictorian fictions.β All that exists is egotism. Cold, intact, and radiant.
β
β
Michel Houellebecq (H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
Gilderoy Lockhart, Order of Merlin, Third Class, Honorary Member of the Dark Force Defense League, and five times winner of Witch Weekly's Most Charming Smile Award. But I don't talk about that; I didn't get rid of the Banden Banshee by smiling at him.
β
β
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Outsider)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Silver Key)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)
β
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 speciesβif separate species we beβfor its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Outsider)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (The Transition of H. P. Lovecraft: The Road to Madness)
β
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.
β
β
H.P. Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature)