American author (1890-1937)
Pleasure to me is wonder--the 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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
It delights me even more, though, to hear that my nameless cosmic monsters have an air of originality about them! Shapeless, unheard-of creatures are not original with me; for although Poe did not use them, they figure quite widely in minor horror-writing since his time. Usually they tend to be exaggerations of certain known life-forms such as insects, poisonous plants, protozoa, & the like, although a few writers break away wholly from terrestrial analogy & depict things as abstractly cosmic as luminous protoplasmic globes. If I have gone beyond these, it is only subtly & atmospherically--in details, & in occasional imputations of geometrical, biological, & physico-chemical properties definitely outside the realm of matter as understood by us.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929
It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Robert E. Howard, October 4, 1930
There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Shunned House"
The poetical tendency of the present and of the preceding century has been divided in a manner singularly curious. One loud and conspicuous faction of bards, giving way to the corrupt influences of a decaying general culture, seems to have abandoned all the properties of versification and reason in its mad scramble after sensational novelty; whilst the other and quieter school constituting a more logical evolution from the poesy of the Georgian period, demands an accuracy of rhyme and metre unknown even to the polished artists of the age of Pope.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Allowable Rhyme"
Life is not the unique property of Earth. Nor is life in the shape of human beings. Life takes many forms on other planets and far stars, forms that would seem bizarre to humans, as human life is bizarre to other life-forms.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Dark Brotherhood"
It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Selected Letters
Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience--but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to E. Hoffmann Price, August 15, 1934
Madness rides the star-wind ... claws and teeth sharpened on centuries of corpses ... dripping death astride a bacchanale of bats from nigh-black ruins of buried temples of Belial.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Hound"
Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Clark Ashton Smith, November 7, 1930
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"
Atop the tallest of earth's peaks dwell the gods of earth, and suffer not man to tell that he hath looked upon them. Lesser peaks they once inhabited; but ever the men from the plains would scale the slopes of rock and snow, driving the gods to higher and higher mountains till now only the last remains. When they left their old peaks they took with them all signs of themselves, save once, it is said, when they left a carven image on the face of the mountain which they called Ngranek.... They are grown stern, and where once they suffered men to displace them, they now forbid men to come; or coming, to depart. It is well for men that they know not of Kadath in the cold waste; else they would seek injudiciously to scale it.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Other Gods"
I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government--but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
Two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to James F. Morton, January 1931
The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Allowable Rhyme"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Rats in the Walls"
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
Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Ex Oblivione"