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. H. P. Lovecraft More Quotes by H. P. Lovecraft More Quotes From H. P. Lovecraft Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. H. P. Lovecraft childhood sadness memories 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 father lying thinking After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world. Later, as the earth's span closed, the transferred minds would again migrate through time and space -- to another stopping place in the bodies of the bulbous vegetable entities of Mercury. But there would be races after them, clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end. H. P. Lovecraft vegetables men civilization It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear. H. P. Lovecraft abnormal fear hot Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating. H. P. Lovecraft fascinating known Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream. H. P. Lovecraft tears dream house All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. H. P. Lovecraft atheist hair thinking I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit. H. P. Lovecraft pits proximity fear I am Providence, and Providence is myself - together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak! H. P. Lovecraft ice shadow age No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned. H. P. Lovecraft emotional real order Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you. H. P. Lovecraft painless disintegration Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other. H. P. Lovecraft vague perceive advantage The glorious Dryden, refiner and purifier of English verse, did less for rhyme than he did for metre. H. P. Lovecraft rhyme verses glorious When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. H. P. Lovecraft writing trying drama It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur" - although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony - or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do - though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story! H. P. Lovecraft doe ideas thinking I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. H. P. Lovecraft real law dream Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way. H. P. Lovecraft horror memories way Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic - the abnormally chromatic entity in The Colour Out of Space being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in. H. P. Lovecraft space pride monsters It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre "kick". Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism; for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination. H. P. Lovecraft imagination night profound Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse. H. P. Lovecraft stars dark children
