American author (1890-1937)
Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic--the abnormally chromatic entity in "The Colour Out of Space" being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929
I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"From Beyond"
To me there is nothing more fraught with mystery & terror than a remote Massachusetts farmhouse against a lonely hill. Where else could an outbreak like the Salem witchcraft have occurred?
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, October 9, 1931
The unknown ... became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, September 14, 1919
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Celephaïs"
I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
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
letter to August Derleth, November 21, 1930
He had turned to the gentle churchly faith endeared to him by the native trust of his fathers, for thence stretched mystic venues which seemed to promise escape from life. Only on closer view did he mark the starved fancy and beauty, the stale and prosy triteness, and the owlish gravity and grotesque claims of solid truth which reigned boresomely and overwhelmingly among most of its professors; or feel to the full the awkwardness with which it sought to keep alive as literal fact the outgrown fears and guesses of a primal race confronting the unknown.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Allowable Rhyme"
Four years ago a large part of the civilised world laboured under certain biological fallacies which may, in a sense, be held responsible for the extent and duration of the present conflict. These fallacies, which were the foundation of pacifism and other pernicious forms of social and political radicalism, dealt with the capacity of man to evolve mentally beyond his former state of subservience to primate instinct and pugnacity, and to conduct his affairs and international or interracial relations on a basis of reason and good-will. That belief in such capability is unscientific and childishly naïve, is beside the question.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"At the Root"
May the merciful gods, 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
"Hypnos"
To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to E. Hoffmann Price, September 29, 1933
I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nemesis"
Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos--to the unknown--which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
Behold great Whitman, whose licentious line
Delights the rake, and warms the souls of swine;
Whose fever'd fancy shuns the measur'd pace,
And copies Ovid's filth without his grace.
In his rough brain a genius might have grown,
Had he not sought to play the brute alone;
But void of shame, he let his wit run wild,
And liv'd and wrote as Adam's bestial child.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Fragment on Whitman"
But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens, of fountains that sing in the sun, of golden cliffs overhanging murmuring seas, of plains that stretch down to sleeping cities of bronze and stone, and of shadowy companies of heroes that ride caparisoned white horses along the edges of thick forests; and then we know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Celephaïs"