Quotes by H.P. Lovecraft

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

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

“When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.”

“There are so 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 a...”

“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.”

“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. No ...”

“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 know...”

“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,...”

“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 o...”

“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 ...”

“I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalismreligion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortal...”

“There is in certain ancient things a traceOf some dim essence --More than form or weight;A tenuous aether, indeterminate,Yet linked with all the laws of time and space.A faint, veiled sign of conti...”

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its content. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and i...”

“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. He knows where the Old Ones broke through of...”

“Heaven knows where I'll end up - it's a safe bet I'll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.”

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

“While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will alw...”

“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 moment it tries to be anything...”

“So through endless twilights I dreamed and waited, though I knew not what I waited for. Then in the shadowy solitude my longing for light grew so frantic that I could rest no more, and I lifted ent...”

“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 ...”