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.
real law evil
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.
law space adults
A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.
emotional space law
Time, space, and natural law hold for me suggestions of intolerable bondage, and I can form no picture of emotional satisfaction which does not involve their defeat--especially the defeat of time, so that one may merge oneself with the whole historic stream and be wholly emancipated from the transient and the ephemeral.
dream real law
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.
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!