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.