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H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

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H.P. Lovecraft was an American horror fiction writer known for his unique cosmic horror style and Gothic narrative. His works often explore the insignificance of humans in the face of the unknown and omnipotent forces, profoundly influencing horror literature in the second half of the 20th century.

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All Men World Knows Dream Horror Humans May Ifs Thinking Mind Real Mankind Writing Space Behinds Black Ends Form Strange Cosmos

Famous H. P. Lovecraft Quotes

“Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal”

Knows Men Real Intellect Distinction Unreal

Book:The Tomb

Source: The Tomb

“I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.”

Real Enthusiasm Flags Real Work

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

“In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror - indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly.”

Real Beautiful Records Horror Various Contact Nightmare Cosmic Originality Uniqueness Beautiful Things Items Imaginative

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

“I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake--whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain.”

Knows Real Dream Law Desire My Own Brain Environment Products Appearance Real Life Permanent Awake Distinction Recognise Actuality Transitory

Book:Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

Source: Against Religion: The Atheist Writings of H.P. Lovecraft

“It is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now - but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived.”

Real Dream Sides Imagination Memories Known Horror Nightmare Cosmic Abyss Infant Leaving Me Hideous Starks Clutch Never Leave Me

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

“One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.”

“It must be remembered that there is no real reason to expect anything in particular from mankind; good and evil are local expedients - or their lack - and not in any sense cosmic truths or laws.”

Real Reason Law Evil Mankind Particular Locals Remembered Good And Evil Cosmic

Author:H. P. Lovecraft

“No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.”

Real Stories Law Order Natural Space Behinds Emotional Concerned Cosmic Violation Defiance Evasion Natural Order

Book:Selected Letters 1934-1937

Source: Selected Letters 1934-1937

“While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is none the less a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain 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.”

Source: H.P. Lovecraft: The Ultimate Collection (160 Works Including Early Writings, Fiction, Collaborations, Poetry, Essays & Bonus Audiobook Links)

“All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.”

Real Dream Life Is Values Causes Born Differences Brain Inward Real Things

Book:Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft

Source: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre: The Best of H. P. Lovecraft

“Now all my tales are based on the fundemental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.... To achieve the essence of real externality, whether of time or space or dimension, one must forget that such things as organic life, good and evil, love and hate, and all such local attributes of a negligible and temporary race called mankind, have any existence at all.”

Source: The Classic Horror Stories

“That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.”

Source: THE WEIRD TALES of H. P. Lovecraft: At the Mountains of Madness, The Call of Cthulhu, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Shunned House, The Outsider, Pickmanäó»s Model, The Picture in the House, The Templeäó_: The Greatest Tales of Horror & Macabre: The Cats of Ulthar, The Shadow over Innsmouth, The Colour Out of Space, The Horror at Red Hook, The Strange High House in the Mist, From Beyond, Dagonäó_

“Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil; but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.”

Source: The Call of Cthulhu and Other Stories