H. P. Lovecraft
H. P. Lovecraft
Howard Phillips Lovecraftwas an American author who achieved posthumous fame through his influential works of horror fiction. Virtually unknown and only published in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors in his genre. Lovecraft was born in Providence, Rhode Island, where he spent most of his life. Among his most celebrated tales is "The Call of Cthulhu", canonical to the Cthulhu Mythos. Never able to support himself from...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth20 August 1890
CityProvidence, RI
CountryUnited States of America
Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic--the abnormally chromatic entity in "The Colour Out of Space" being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.
Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration.
In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call "happiness", if we be but able to entertain them.
Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.
Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment.
Every limited mind demands a certain freedom of expression, and the man who cannot express himself satisfactorily without the stimulation derived from the spirited mode of two centuries ago should certainly be permitted to follow without undue restraint a practice so harmless, so free from essential error, and so sanctioned by precedent, as that of employing in his poetical compositions the smooth and inoffensive allowable rhyme.
Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.
The dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.
The unknown ... became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.
You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you ever moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier; have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen?
Of what use is it to please the herd? They are simply coarse animals -- for all that is admirable in man is the artificial product of special breeding.
There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.