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
In his house at R'lyeh, dead Cthulu waits dreaming
For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men. This I have known ever since I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.
An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.
I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I continue to refrain from suicide--the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality.
With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me.
I could not write about "ordinary people" because I am not in the least interested in them.
The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind--yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy.
I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.
It is good to be a cynic it is better to be a contented cat and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
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!
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.