American author (1890-1937)
No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Ex Oblivione"
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"
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 every-day life. Relatively few are free enough from the spell of the daily routine to respond to rappings from outside, and tales of ordinary feelings and events, or of common sentimental distortions of such feelings and events, will always take first place in the taste of the majority; rightly, perhaps, since of course these ordinary matters make up the greater part of human experience.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
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"
It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients--or their lack--and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
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"
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
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
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
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"
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"
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Transition of Juan Romero"
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
I should describe mine own nature as tripartite, my interests consisting of three parallel and dissociated groups--(a) Love of the strange and fantastic. (b) Love of the abstract truth and of scientific logic. (c) Love of the ancient and the permanent. Sundry combinations of these three strains will probably account for all my odd tastes and eccentricities.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, March 7, 1920
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
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