American author (1890-1937)
Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
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. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries--or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me--in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Elizabeth Toldridge, March 8, 1929
Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Defence Remains Open!"
All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"At the Root"
Good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Woodburn Harris, February/March 1929
Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Supernatural Horror in Literature"
Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training it can be elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"At the Root"
But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
Selected Letters
In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"
In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Kleiner, Cole, and Moe, October 1916
All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me ...
H. P. LOVECRAFT
letter to Frank Belknap, February 27, 1931
If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nietzscheism and Realism"
Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Call of Cthulhu"