P Lovecraft
P Lovecraft
law cosmos fundamentals
All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
mean ideas cosmos
Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos.
mean giving cosmos
It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.
issues greed cosmos
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.
emotion emotions fear oldest strongest
Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind.
blank sensible ifs
If we were sensible we would seek death--the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
memories way horror
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
world pope concerned
So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.
lonely thrill woods
No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
shortcuts thinker primitive
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
stars fall hero
Rome was so mighty that it could not fall. It had to vanish in a cloud, like so many of the mythical heros of antiquity, and to receive its apotheosis among the stars before men became fully aware that it had vanished from the earth!
beautiful real records
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.
doors hands body
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
lovers grotesque
incurable lover of the grotesque