The 68 Best Sentences of H. P. Lovecraft (and Famous Quotes)
H. P. Lovecraft (Providence, Rhode Island, August 20, 1890-ibid, March 15, 1937) was an American author, famous for his works of horror, science fiction and dystopias.
His career as a writer marked the next generations of the genre, since he innovated in different areas of literature.
- Related article: "100 phrases from famous books and writers (essential)"
Phrases of H. P. Lovecraft, and large fragments of his work
In his works, Lovecraft He mixed terror with the supernatural, science fiction, futurism and more elements that made it totally recognizable to the general public. He also cultivated works of poetry, essays and missives.
Today let's know the best quotes of H. P. Lovecraft , as well as some of the fragments of his books that most remember his readers.
1. (...) The only thing he asks of life is not to think. For some reason, thinking is awful to him, and he flees like a plague of everything that can stimulate his imagination. He is a very skinny, gray and wrinkled subject, although some say he is not as old as he appears. Fear has dug into him his gruesome claws, and any sound makes him wince, his eyes wide open and his forehead covered in sweat.
Describing a gray man.
2. What followed then was an exhaustive comparison of details and a moment of dreadful silence when the detective and the scientist came to the conclusion of the practical identity of the phrase common to those two diabolical rituals belonging to worlds so different and distant from each other. .
Excerpt from "The strange house raised in the fog".
3. These people are so silent and sullen that one has the impression of being in front of a recondite enigma of which it is better not to try to find out anything. And that feeling of strange restlessness is intensified when, from a high point of the road, you can see the mountains that rise above the dense forests that cover the region.
Another small fragment of the same book: "The strange house raised in the fog".
4. About tombs and tombs I already knew a lot and imagined, although due to my peculiar character I had separated myself from all contact with cemeteries and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the slope represented for me a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior, within which I vainly tried to peek through the opening so incitingly disposed, had no connotations of death or decay.
A few lines from his work "La tumba".
5. The terms that can best suggest the general character of our experiences are those of immersions or ascents; for in each revelation, a part of our mind was separated from what is real and present, and plunged ethereally into frightful, dark and overwhelming chasms, sometimes going beyond certain definite and characteristic obstacles that I could only describe as viscous and coarse vapor clouds .
From his work "Hipnos".
6. West of Arkham, the hills rise jungle, and there are valleys with deep forests in which the sound of an ax has never resounded. There are narrow, dark canyons where the trees bend fantastically, and where narrow streams run that have never caught the reflection of sunlight. (...) But all of them are now empty, with the wide chimneys falling apart and the walls buckling under the roofs of the Dutch.
Describing the landscape of one of his most famous works.
7. (...) It was not the result of the planets and suns that shine in the telescopes and photographic plates of our observatories. It was no breath of the heavens whose movements and dimensions our astronomers measure or consider too vast to be measured. It was no more than a color sprung from space ... A dreadful messenger from the realms of infinity located beyond Nature that we know; of a kingdom whose simple existence stuns the brain with the immense extra-cosmic possibilities it offers to our imagination.
Another fragment of "The strange house raised in the fog".
8. Men of a broader mentality know that there is no clear distinction between the real and the unreal; that all things seem what they seem only by virtue of the delicate psychic and mental instruments of each individual, thanks to which we come to know them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of clairvoyance that pierce the common veil of clear empiricism.
On the mentality of the winning people.
9. Death is merciful, since there is no return from it; but for the one who returns from the deepest chambers of the night, lost and conscious, there is no peace again.
Bad life always chases you.
10May the merciful gods, if they do exist, protect those hours in which no power of will, nor drugs invented by the ingenuity of man, can keep me from the abyss of sleep!
A request to the highest.
11. On a slab, inside a niche, he discovered an old but empty coffin, on whose tarnished plaque reads this simple word: "Jervas". In that coffin and in that crypt he has promised me that I will be buried.
Fragment to start shaking.
12. In front of that lighthouse the majestic boats of the seven seas have paraded for a space of a century. In my grandfather's time they were a crowd; in my father's not so much, and now they are so few that sometimes I feel strangely alone, as if I were the last man on our planet.
Reflection on the immensity of life.
13. There was no doubt that the descriptions of dreams and the clippings compiled by the professor came to corroborate the facts, but the rationality of my mind and the extravagance of this whole subject led me to adopt what in my opinion were the most important conclusions. sensible.
About dreams and how they influence our thinking.
14. The oldest and most intense emotion of humanity is fear, and the oldest and most intense fear is fear of the unknown.
Certainly, fear is an atavistic feeling.
15. Neither death nor fatality nor anxiety can produce the unbearable despair that results from losing one's identity.
Above all, be yourself.
16. Men of science suspect something about that world, but they ignore almost everything. The wise interpret the dreams, and the gods laugh.
Great phrase from Lovecraft.
17. Journalism is an easy trade. A matter of writing what others say.
Do not believe, they only explain what is created.
18. The satisfaction of one moment is the ruin of the next.
Hedonism does not usually have a good future.
19. The man who knows the truth is beyond good and evil. The man who knows the truth has understood that the illusion is the only reality and that the substance is the great imposter.
A phrase that Nietzsche could have uttered.
20. It is a pity that most of humanity has a mental vision so limited when it comes to calmly and intelligently weighing those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a few psychically sensitive people, that happen beyond the experience common.
About the paranormal.
21. Who knows the end? What has emerged can sink and what has sunk can emerge. The satanic awaits dreaming at the bottom of the sea, and over the undulating humanized cities the apocalypse sails.
Reflection of philosophical cut.
22. I refuse to follow the mechanical conventions of popular literature or fill my stories with common characters and situations, but I insist on the reproduction of true impressions and feelings in the best way I can achieve it. The result may be poor, but I prefer to continue to aspire to serious literary expression rather than accept the artificial standards of cheap romance.
About finding your own style.
23. We had no record of the passage of time, because time had become for us a mere illusion.
Sometimes, time loses its validity.
24. Among the anguish of the days that followed is the greatest of the tortures: ineffability. I will never be able to explain what I saw and knew during those hours of impious exploration, due to the lack of symbols and the ability to suggest languages.
A world of phenomena that occur beyond human understanding.
25. They were sensations; but within them there were incredible elements of time and space ... Things that at the bottom have a clear and definite existence.
One of the ambiguous explanations about the incomprehensible events that occur at the cosmic scale of the Lovecraft beasts.
26. But more wonderful than the wisdom of the elders and that the wisdom of the books is the secret wisdom of the ocean.
One more of the Lovecraft phrases that refer to the arcane to talk about what happens in their stories.
27. The logical place to find a voice from other times is a cemetery from other times.
Another piece that shows the construction of fictional worlds of this writer.
28. Whenever the stars were in position, they could jump from one world to another through the heavens; but when the stars were not propitious, They could not live. But even if they could not live, they would not really die either.
The extraterrestrial origin of the Lovecraftian monsters is expressed in a shallow way, because the logic in which they operate can not be understood.
29. Their voices make the wind tremble and their consciences tremble the earth. They fold entire forests and crush cities, but never forest or city has seen the destructive hand.
This is indirectly expressed the gigantic scale of the horrors that are spoken of in this writer's stories.
30. Our ability to avoid a prolonged sleep was surprising, since we seldom succumbed more than an hour or two to that darkness that had now become a frightening threat.
The tension of the situations lived in the pages of Lovecraft go hand in hand with constant alertness.
31. Did fate preserve my reason only to irresistibly drag me to a more horrible and unthinkable end than anyone could have dreamed?
The feeling that humans are defenseless against cosmic forces is another constant in his work.
32. No known art school had encouraged the creation of this terrible object, but hundreds and even thousands of years seemed to be marked on its dark and green stone surface whose identification was impossible.
The impossibility of understanding the products coming from the world of the Lovecraftian beasts is one of the characteristics of the universe that the Providence writer created.
33. A strange impulse led me to climb the wide slab, turn off the candle and lie inside the empty box.
Fragment of one of his texts.
34. Something terrible came to the hills and valleys with that meteor, and something terrible, although I do not know to what extent, is still there.
In this way, Lovecraft creates an atmosphere of terror.
35. Some say that things and places have a soul, and some say no; For my part, I do not dare to speak, but I want to talk about the Street.
An appreciation of the dualism applied to spaces.
36. It must be a natural disease ... Although it was impossible to guess what kind of disease produced those terrible results.
The mixture of the unnatural and the natural is one of the ingredients that Lovecraft used to create ambiguous situations.
37. Nobody dances sober unless he is completely crazy.
Fun opinion of this writer.
38. The ocean is older than the mountains and is loaded with the memories and dreams of time.
A mythical perspective of the sea and the oceans.
39. The oldest and strongest emotion of humanity is fear.
About our most primary emotional side.
40. The most merciful thing in the world, I believe, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents ... someday the splicing of dissociated knowledge will open such terrifying perspectives of reality, and our frightful position in it, that we will go crazy for the revelation or we will flee from the light to the peace and security of a new Dark Age.
Knowledge can be frightening.
41. No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of everyday life.
The boredom that sometimes produces the familiar can become, for this writer, an ordeal.
42. I felt on the edge of the world; looking over the edge in an unfathomable chaos of eternal night.
In the limits of what is reasonable, a sensation of vertigo appears.
43. Who knows the end? What has gone up may sink, and what has sunk may increase. The detestability waits and dreams in the depths, and the decay extends over the shaky cities of men.
The collapse of what we appreciate can come at any time.
44. I have taken advantage of the shadows that pass from one world to another to sow death and madness.
One of Lovecraft's most poetic (and sinister) phrases.
45. The ignorant and the deceived are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. What is not known does not bother us, while an imagined but insubstantial danger does not harm us. Knowing the truths behind reality is a much greater burden.
To remain oblivious to reality, according to this writer, takes away our pressure.
46. I am afraid that my enthusiasm will call when real work is required of me.
The desire to experiment can come at the most inopportune moment.
47. With strange eons even death can die.
An apparent paradox.
48. All life is just a set of images in the brain, between which there is no difference between those born of real things and those born of internal dreams, and there is no reason to value one over the other.
Interesting reflection on the value of memories.
49. Our brains deliberately make us forget things, to prevent madness.
An explanation about the fact that memory does not keep everything.
50. If I'm angry, it's mercy! May the gods sympathize with the man who, in his insensibility, can remain sane until the horrible end!
Another of his opinions about the concept of madness.
51. If the religion were true, his followers would not attempt to beat their young with artificial conformity; they would simply insist on their inflexible search for truth, regardless of artificial background or practical consequences.
Lovecraft sees religion as a system of artificial imposed beliefs.
52. All I want is to know things. The black gulph of infinity is in front of me.
A hunger for knowledge
53. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems hardly possible for any true civilized cynical esthete to do anything other than worship him.
A curious reflection about these felines.
54. Creative minds are unequal, and the best fabrics have their dots opaque.
In talent there are decompensations.
55Memories and possibilities are even more horrible than realities.
What is not in the present carries a greater emotional weight than what takes place in the now.
56. The deepening process in the black abyss is for me the most acute form of fascination.
The idea of seeing beyond what can be known is something that hypnotizes us.
57. The world is really funny, but the joke is on humanity.
The subject who suffers the frivolity of existence is, for Lovecraft, the entire human species.
58. Man is an essentially superstitious and fearful animal. Remove the Christian gods and saints from the pack and, without fail, come to worship ... something else.
A deterministic view of religions.
59. I never ask a man what his business is, because I'm never interested. What I ask are your thoughts and dreams.
Beyond our initiatives made to survive is what makes us live.
60. Only poetry or madness could do justice to noise.
Chaos is the norm, not the exception.
61. The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.
About the motivations that drive progress.
62. I like coffee excessively.
A curiosity about the personal preferences of the writer.
63. I have always been a seeker, a dreamer and a ponderous one in search and dreaming.
This is one of Lovecraft's phrases that reflect his tendency to evade reality.
64. Life is something horrible.
This way of feeling is reflected in his literary work.
65. Life has never interested me as much as escaping from life.
A philosophy of life opposed to vitalism.
66. The basis of all true cosmic horror is the violation of the order of nature, and the deepest violations are always the least concrete and describable.
Lovecraft describes the foundation of the genre he created.
67. I always know that I am a stranger; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
It has been said that Lovecraft was one of the last products of the Victorian era.
68. What a man does for payment is of little importance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument that responds to the beauty of the world, is everything!
A logic beyond mercantilism.
