No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.

There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.

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.

There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror; incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret.

Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.

All great humorists are sad… I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest – the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.

Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber, Past the wan-mooned abysses of night, I have lived o’er my lives without number, I have sounded all things with my sight.

A page of Addison or of Irving will teach more of style than a whole manual of rules, whilst a story of Poe’s will impress upon the mind a more vivid notion of powerful and correct description and narration than will ten dry chapters of a bulky textbook.

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.

I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them.

The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound – and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.

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.

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.

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.

An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.

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

In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!

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.

Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment.

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance’s of theism’s truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else.

In its flawless grace and superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality of the universe itself, objectively considered, and in its air of silent mystery there resides for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown.

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.

Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.

Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.

There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla.

In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call “happiness”, if we be but able to entertain them.

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.

The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.

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.

The sea can bind us to her many moods, whispering to us by the subtle token of a shadow or a gleam upon the waves, and hinting in these ways of her mournfulness or rejoicing. Always she is remembering old things, and these memories, though we may not grasp them, are imparted to us, so that we share her gaiety or remorse.

I could not write about “ordinary people” because I am not in the least interested in them.

Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word “eldritch” so many times now that I think about it.

Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal.

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.

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.

Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That’s because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.

I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.

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.

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

I am a student of life, and don’t want to miss any experience. There’s poetry in this sort of thing, you know–or perhaps you don’t know, but it’s all the same.

The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this–whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe’s utmost rim.

The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!

It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.

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.

Something was creeping and creeping and waiting to be seen and felt and heard.

Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large…. To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of identity.

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.

Do not call up that which you cannot put down.

I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained; man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.

In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming.

Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the… cosmos… gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.

Religion is still useful among the herd – that it helps their orderly conduct as nothing else could. The crude human animal is in-eradicably superstitious, and there is every biological reason why they should be.
Take away his Christian god and saints, and he will worship something else.

At night, when the objective world has slunk back into its cavern and left dreamers to their own, there come inspirations and capabilities impossible at any less magical and quiet hour. No one knows whether or not he is a writer unless he has tried writing at night.

To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest.

If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.

Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me.

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me.

The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see

The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.

Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating.

The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.

My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.

It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.

Incurable lover of the grotesque.

Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you.

We must stop thinking primarily in terms of “money” and “business”.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

To the scientist, there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth.

But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.

We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.

It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day’s end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may.

Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent.

I like coffee exceedingly.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

I am disillusioned enough to know that no man’s opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he’s talking about.

Man is an essentially superstitious and fearful animal. Take away the herd’s Christian gods and saints and they will without failing come to worship…something else.

I am only about half alive a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.

I was thirty-five and I’d thought I was playing political poker and it turned out I’d been playing in some other game I didn’t even know about.

If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

Heaven knows where I’ll end up – but it’s a safe bet that I’ll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.

I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.

I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror,and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.

I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species – if separate species we be – for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loossed upon the world.

Life is a hideous thing.

As human beings, our only sensible scale of values is one based on lessening the agony of existence.

Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.

The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden.

As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, [and] steel their emotions against decent human sympathy.

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.

The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.

Even when the characters are supposed to be accustomed to the wonder, I try to weave an air of awe and impressiveness corresponding to what the reader should feel. A casual style ruins any serious fantasy.

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 everyday life.

In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.

Horrors, I believe, should be original – the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence.

To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden.

No formal course in fiction writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.

One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions.

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming.

Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity.

In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary.

There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.

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.

I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars….I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to world to sow death and madness.

I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

The moon is dark, and the gods dance in the night; there is terror in the sky, for upon the moon hath sunk an eclipse foretold in no books of men or of earth’s gods.

I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide–the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality.

Religion itself is an absurdity and an anomaly, and paganism is acceptable only because it represents that purely orgiastic phase of religion farthest from reality.

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.

Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or ‘outsideness’ without laying stress on the emotion of fear.

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.

Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.

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

Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world’s beauty, is everything!

Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.

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.

Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.

There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.

I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

Never Explain Anything.

I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1,500 or so books I possess.

Pleasure to me is wonder – the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.

It is good to be a cynic – it is better to be a contented cat – and it is best not to exist at all.

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

It seemed to be a sort of monster, or symbol representing a monster, of a form which only a diseased fancy could conceive. If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing.

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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

If heaven ever wishes to grant me a boon, it will be a total effacing of the results of a mere change which fixed my eye on a certain stray piece of shelf-paper.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents… 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.

Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent insanity.

No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.

That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.

Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.