H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

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.

I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.

I'm interested in the dark side of man. I'm interested in taboos, and murder is the greatest taboo. Characters are fascinating in their extremity, not in their happiness.

I'm playing dark history. It's beyond black. I'm dealing with the dark things of the cosmos.

'The Waking Dark' is about what happens when something awakens a town's darkest impulses and unleashes them on the world.

I think that the worst thing is realizing that mankind - that - that human beings can be so horrible to other human beings.

There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of sins that were new.

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death.

It wouldn't make for sanity would it, living with the devil.

There were faces at the windows and words written in blood; deep in the crypt a lonely ghoul crunched on something that might once have been alive; forked lightnings slashed the ebony night; the faceless were walking; all was right with the world

The mountains of madness have many little plateau of sanity.

Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points.

Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that.

Faith and feelings are the warm marrow of evil. Unlike reason, faith and feelings provide no boundary to limit any delusion, any whim. They are virulent poison, giving the numbing illusion of moral sanction to every depravity ever hatched. Faith and feelings are the darkness to reason’s light. Reason is the very substance of truth itself. The glory that is life is wholly embraced through reason. In rejecting it, in rejecting reason, one embraces death.

Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .

The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.

And travellers, now, within that valley, Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms, that move fantastically To a discordant melody, While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh — but smile no more.

I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.

It's not demons (who at least have a human face) but Hell itself that seems to be laughing inside me, it's the croaking madness of the dead universe, the spinning cadaver of physical space, the end of all worlds blowing blackly in the wind, formless and timeless, without a God who created it, without even its own self, impossibly whirling in the absolute darkness as the one and only reality, everything.

I had the feeling that some horrible image was just beyond the field of vision, moving, as I turned my head, so that I never quite saw it.

When the ghost comes round at midnight Well you both can have some fun He can drive you mad, he can make you sad He can keep you from the sun When they take him down, he'll be both safe and sound And the hand does fit the glove And no matter what they tell you, There's good and evil in everyone.

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.

And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.

Monsters are the result of the sleep of reason.