At the Mountains of Madness Quotes

“I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let 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.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”;”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men!”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable;”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last - even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space—their”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Nature had played a hellish jest on them - as it will on any others that human madness, callousness, or cruelty may hereafter dig up in that hideously dead or sleeping polar waste - and this was their tragic homecoming.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“It was as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“And these glimpses have been as often of the ways that were and the ways that might be, as of the ways that are; for ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“know. A few daring mystics have hinted at a pre-Pleistocene origin for the fragmentary Pnakotic Manuscripts, and have suggested that the devotees of Tsathoggua were as alien to mankind as Tsathoggua itself.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“The things once rearing and dwelling in this frightful masonry in the age of dinosaurs were not indeed dinosaurs, but far worse. Mere dinosaurs were new and almost brainless objects - but the builders of the city were wise and old, and had left certain traces in rocks even then laid down well nigh a thousand million years - rocks laid down before the true life of earth had advanced beyond plastic groups of cells - rocks laid down before the true life of earth had existed at all. They were the makers and enslavers of that life, and above all doubt the originals of the fiendish elder myths which things like the Pnakotic Manuscripts and the Necronomicon affrightedly hint about. They were the great "Old Ones" that had filtered down from the stars when earth was young - the beings whose substance an alien evolution had shaped, and whose powers were such as this planet had never bred.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances, in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Comanchian”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness

“Habían llegado a una cueva. Tras los primeros sondeos, la arenisca había dado paso a una vena caliza comanchiense llena de diminutos fósiles de cefalópodos, corales, equinoideos y spirifera, con indicios ocasionales de esponjas silíceas y huesos de vertebrados marinos —probablemente de teleósteos, tiburones y ganoideos—”
― H.P. Lovecraft, En las montañas de la locura