H. P. Lovecraft quotes - page 3

Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes. (H. P. Lovecraft)
Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist-that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is-both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology-of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
H. P. Lovecraft
To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law-to be linked with the vast outside-to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate-surely such a thing was worth the risk of one's life, soul, and sanity!
H. P. Lovecraft
Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry - God Save The King! I am naturally a Nordic - a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests - a Vikinga berserk killer - a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa - a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires - a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras - a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls - a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures - a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans - a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim - a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares - aye - I speak truly - for was I not born with yellow hair and blue eyes.
H. P. Lovecraft
I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
H. P. Lovecraft
I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
H. P. Lovecraft
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
H. P. Lovecraft
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
H. P. Lovecraft
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.
H. P. Lovecraft
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!
H. P. Lovecraft
I like coffee exceedingly. (H. P. Lovecraft)
Never Explain Anything.
H. P. Lovecraft
As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
H. P. Lovecraft
Pleasure to me is wonder-the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.
H. P. Lovecraft
I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide - the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality.
H. P. Lovecraft
Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
H. P. Lovecraft
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
H. P. Lovecraft
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
H. P. Lovecraft
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
H. P. Lovecraft
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
H. P. Lovecraft
We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight. (H. P. Lovecraft)
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
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.
H. P. Lovecraft
May the merciful god, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.
H. P. Lovecraft
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.
H. P. Lovecraft