Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included Quotes

“Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible memory. It is as if our inward selves, released from the bonds of daytime and objectivity, revelled in prisoned emotions which are hastily stifled when we translate them. In dreams and visions lie the greatest creations of man, for on them rests no yoke of line or hue. Forgotten scenes, and lands more obscure than the golden world of childhood, spring into the sleeping mind to reign until awakening puts them to rout.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection

“They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“At this horror I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“Even yet I do not know why the ocean holds such a fascination for me. But then, perhaps none of us can solve those things—they exist in defiance of all explanation. There are men, and wise men, who do not like the sea and its lapping surf on yellow shores; and they think us strange who love the mystery of the ancient and unending deep. Yet for me there is a haunting and inscrutable glamour in all the ocean's moods. It is in the melancholy silver foam beneath the moon's waxen corpse; it hovers over the silent and eternal waves that beat on naked shores; it is there when all is lifeless save for unknown shapes that glide through sombre depths. And when I behold the awesome billows surging in endless strength, there comes upon me an ecstasy akin to fear; so that I must abase myself before this mightiness, that I may not hate the clotted waters and their overwhelming beauty. Vast and lonely is the ocean, and even as all things came from it, so shall they return thereto. In the shrouded depths of time none shall reign upon the earth, nor shall any motion be, save in the eternal waters. And these shall beat on dark shores in thunderous foam, though none shall remain in that dying world to watch the cold light of the enfeebled moon playing on the swirling tides and coarse-grained sand. On the deep's margin shall rest only a stagnant foam, gathering about the shells and bones of perished shapes that dwelt within the waters. Silent, flabby things will toss and roll along empty shores, their sluggish life extinct. Then all shall be dark, for at last even the white moon on the distant waves shall wink out. Nothing shall be left, neither above nor below the sombre waters. And until that last millennium, and beyond the perishing of all other things, the sea will thunder and toss throughout the dismal night.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection

“I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“all which is forgotten need not necessarily be dead,”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“From the tangle of chimney-pots scarcely a wisp of smoke came,”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“I know that light is not for me, save that of the moon over the rock tombs of Neb, nor any gaiety save the unnamed feasts of Nitokris beneath the Great Pyramid; yet in my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. Wretched is he who looks back upon lone hours in vast and dismal chambers with brown hangings and maddening rows of antique books, or upon awed watches in twilight groves of grotesque, gigantic, and vine-encumbered trees that silently wave twisted branches far aloft. Such a lot the gods gave to me—to me, the dazed, the disappointed; the barren, the broken.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“I choose weird stories because they suit my inclination best—one of my strongest and most persistent wishes being to achieve, momentarily, the illusion of some strange suspension or violation of the galling limitations of time, space, and natural law which for ever imprison us and frustrate our curiosity about the infinite cosmic spaces beyond the radius of our sight and analysis.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind—of a day when the land shall sink, and the dark ocean floor shall ascend amidst universal pandemonium.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“That Crawford Tilinghast should ever have studied science and philosophy was a mistake. These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair, if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.”
― H. P. Lovecraft, The Ultimate Collection

“If I say that my somewhat extravagant imagination yielded simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature, I shall not be unfaithful to the spirit of the thing. A pulpy, tentacled head surmounted a grotesque and scaly body with rudimentary wings; but it was the general outline of the whole which made it most shockingly frightful. Behind the figure was a vague suggestion of a Cyclopean architectural background.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of Spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped the Earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“shadowy tangles of unpaved musty-smelling lanes where eldritch”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“Monstrous, unnatural, colossal, was the thing—too far beyond all the ideas of man to be believed except in the silent damnable small hours of the morning when one cannot sleep.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“There will always be a small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“For I, despite all you can say, and despite all I sometimes try to say to myself, know that loathsome outside influences must be lurking there in the half-unknown hills—and that those influences have spies and emissaries in the world of men.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected, so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or “outsideness” without laying stress on the emotion of fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“that in which young Wilcox had had his strange visitations.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“I sank nearly to the lichened earth, transfixed with a dread not of this nor any world, but only of the mad spaces between the stars.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“Hieroglyphics had covered the walls and pillars, and from some undetermined point below had come a voice that was not a voice; a chaotic sensation which only fancy could transmute into sound, but which he attempted to render by the almost unpronounceable jumble of letters, “Cthulhu fhtagn”.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds,”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Complete Collection of H.P. Lovecraft - 150 eBooks with 100+ Audio Books Included

“Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was not frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginnings of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgement to my readers when they shall have learnt all.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection

“In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection

“when there suddenly fell to my experience one of the most profound and maddening shocks capable of reception by the human mind. Without warning, I heard the heavy door behind me creak slowly open upon its rusted hinges. My immediate sensations are incapable of analysis. To be confronted in a place as thoroughly deserted as I had deemed the old castle with evidence of the presence of man or spirit, produced in my brain a horror of the most acute description. When at last I turned and faced the seat of the sound, my eyes must have started from their orbits at the sight that they beheld.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection

“High up, crowning the grassy summit of a swelling mound whose sides are wooded near the base with the gnarled trees of the primeval forest, stands the old chateau of my ancestors. For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honoured line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls. These ancient turrets, stained by the storms of generations and crumbling under the slow yet mighty pressure of time, formed in the ages of feudalism one of the most dreaded and formidable fortresses in all France. From its machicolated parapets and mounted battlements Barons, Counts, and even Kings had been defied, yet never had its spacious halls resounded to the footsteps of the invader.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection