H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

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H. P. Lovecraft

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 20, 1890

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

H. P. Lovecraft

Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.

H. P. Lovecraft

I do not think that any realism is beautiful.

H. P. Lovecraft

To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form - and local human passions and conditions and standards - are depicted as native to other worlds and universes.

H. P. Lovecraft

Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate.

H. P. Lovecraft

It is only the forcible propagation of conventional Christianity that makes the agnostic so bitter toward the church. He knows that all the doctrines cannot possibly be true, but he would view them with toleration if he were asked merely to let them alone for the benefit of the masses whom they can help and succour.

H. P. Lovecraft

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

H. P. Lovecraft

Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long - then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression.

H. P. Lovecraft

All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness.

H. P. Lovecraft

One can never produce anything as terrible and impressive as one can awesomely hint about.

H. P. Lovecraft

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

H. P. Lovecraft

Nothing is really typical of my efforts... I'm simply casting about for better ways to crystallise and capture certain strong impressions (involving the elements of time, the unknown, cause and effect, fear, scenic and architectural beauty, and other seemingly ill-assorted things) which persist in clamouring for expression.

H. P. Lovecraft

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!

H. P. Lovecraft

But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?

H. P. Lovecraft

In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.

H. P. Lovecraft

I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous - that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn't.

H. P. Lovecraft

Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.

H. P. Lovecraft

A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep.

H. P. Lovecraft

Adulthood is hell.

H. P. Lovecraft

Never should an unfamiliar word be passed over without elucidation, for, with a little conscientious research, we may each day add to our conquests in the realm of philology and become more and more ready for graceful independent expression.

H. P. Lovecraft