Howard Phillips Lovecraft cytaty (224 cytatów)

Wariant: 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.
Źródło: The Call of Cthulhu

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

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H.P. Lovecraft

Źródło: Night Ocean et autres nouvelles

“Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

"Herbert West: Re-Animator" in "Home Brew" Vol. 1, No. 1 (February 1922)
Fiction

“incurable lover of the grotesque”

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H.P. Lovecraft

“It is true that I have sent six bullets through the head of my best friend, and yet I hope to show by this statement that I am not his murderer.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

“We shall dive down through black abysses… and in that lair of the Deep Ones we shall dwell amidst wonder and glory forever.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

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

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H.P. Lovecraft

"Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927)
Non-Fiction
Wariant: The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown
Źródło: The Complete Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft

“Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

“It is good to be a cynic—it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world—we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death—the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

"Nietzscheism and Realism" from The Rainbow, Vol. I, No. 1 (October 1921); reprinted in "To Quebec and the Stars", and also in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 71
Non-Fiction
Źródło: Collected Essays 5: Philosophy, Autobiography and Miscellany

“I have seen the dark universe yawning
Where the black planets roll without aim,
Where they roll in their horror unheeded,
Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Źródło: Nemesis

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

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H.P. Lovecraft książka The Temple

Źródło: The Temple

“I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

“Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.”

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H.P. Lovecraft książka The Rats in the Walls

Źródło: The Rats in the Walls

“For those who relish speculation regarding the future, the tale of supernatural horror provides an interesting field.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Źródło: The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature: Revised and Enlarged

“I can better understand the inert blindness & defiant ignorance of the reactionaries from having been one of them. I know how smugly ignorant I was—wrapped up in the arts, the natural (not social) sciences, the externals of history & antiquarianism, the abstract academic phases of philosophy, & so on—all the one-sided standard lore to which, according to the traditions of the dying order, a liberal education was limited. God! the things that were left out—the inside facts of history, the rational interpretation of periodic social crises, the foundations of economics & sociology, the actual state of the world today … & above all, the habit of applying disinterested reason to problems hitherto approached only with traditional genuflections, flag-waving, & callous shoulder-shrugs! All this comes up with humiliating force through an incident of a few days ago—when young Conover, having established contact with Henneberger, the ex-owner of WT, obtained from the latter a long epistle which I wrote Edwin Baird on Feby. 3, 1924, in response to a request for biographical & personal data. Little Willis asked permission to publish the text in his combined SFC-Fantasy, & I began looking the thing over to see what it was like—for I had not the least recollection of ever having penned it. Well …. I managed to get through, after about 10 closely typed pages of egotistical reminiscences & showing-off & expressions of opinion about mankind & the universe. I did not faint—but I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 … only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centred, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better! That earlier illness had kept me in seclusion, limited my knowledge of the world, & given me something of the fatuous effusiveness of a belated adolescent when I finally was able to get around more in 1920, is hardly much of an excuse. Well—there was nothing to be done … except to rush a note back to Conover & tell him I'd dismember him & run the fragments through a sausage-grinder if he ever thought of printing such a thing! The only consolation lay in the reflection that I had matured a bit since '24. It's hard to have done all one's growing up since 33—but that's a damn sight better than not growing up at all.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Catherine L. Moore (7 February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 407-408
Non-Fiction, Letters

“From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Shunned House (1924)
Źródło: Tales of H.P. Lovecraft

“I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

“These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Kontekst: There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless Chinamen had told him, were still be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.
These Great Old Ones, Castro continued, were not composed altogether of flesh and blood. They had shape — for did not this star-fashioned image prove it? — but that shape was not made of matter. When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die...

“Without interest there can be no art.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

"The Defence Remains Open!" (April 1921), published in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 53
Non-Fiction
Kontekst: The opinions of the masses are of no interest to me, for praise can truly gratify only when it comes from a mind sharing the author's perspective. There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression. I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them. Without interest there can be no art. Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos—to the unknown—which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination. The humanocentric pose is impossible to me, for I cannot acquire the primitive myopia which magnifies the earth and ignores the background. Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty. Like the late Mr. Wilde, "I live in terror of not being misunderstood."