H. P. Lovecraft

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

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.

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.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.

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.

The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.

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

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.

It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.

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.

incurable lover of the grotesque

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

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