American author (1890-1937)
The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Allowable Rhyme"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright accompanying his submission of "The Call of Cthulhu", summer 1927
I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
At the Mountains of Madness
The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Thing on the Doorstep"
One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird, Weird Tales, March 1924
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
letter to James F. Morton, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Dunwich Horror"
Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals -- for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to James F. Morton, February 10, 1923
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Beyond the Wall of Sleep"
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
Non-Euclidean calculus and quantum physics are enough to stretch any brain; and when one mixes them with folklore, and tries to trace a strange background of multi-dimensional reality behind the ghoulish hints of Gothic tales and the wild whispers of the chimney-corner, one can hardly expect to be wholly free from mental tension.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Dreams in the Witch House"
Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Maurice W. Moe, January 16, 1915
My conception of phantasy, as a genuine art-form, is an extension rather than a negation of reality. Ordinary tales about a castle ghost or old-fashioned werewolf are merely so much junk. The true function of phantasy is to give the imagination a ground for limitless expansion, and to satisfy aesthetically the sincere and burning curiosity and sense of awe which a sensitive minority of mankind feel toward the alluring and provocative abysses of unplumbed space and unguessed entity which press in upon the known world from unknown infinities and in unknown relationships of time, space, matter, force, dimensionality, and consciousness. This curiosity and sense of awe, I believe, are quite basic among the sensitive minority in question; and I see no reason to think that they will decline in the future--for as you point out, the frontier of the unknown can never do more than scratch the surface of eternally unknowable infinity.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Clark Ashton Smith, October 17, 1930
We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"At the Root"
My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Transition of Juan Romero"
It was an All-in-One and One-in-All of limitless being and self -- not merely a thing of one Space-Time continuum, but allied to the ultimate animating essence of existence's whole unbounded sweep -- the last, utter sweep which has no confines and which outreaches fancy and mathematics alike. It was perhaps that which certain secret cults of earth have whispered of as YOG-SOTHOTH, and which has been a deity under other names; that which the crustaceans of Yuggoth worship as the Beyond-One, and which the vaporous brains of the spiral nebulae know by an untranslatable Sign.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Through the Gates of the Silver Key"
In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror--indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929
Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Allowable Rhyme"