P Lovecraft
P Lovecraft
shortcuts thinker primitive
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
emotion emotions fear oldest strongest
Fear is the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind.
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.
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.
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
art writing sight
My reason for writing stories is to give myself the satisfaction of visualising more clearly and detailedly and stably the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy which are conveyed to me by certain sights (scenic, architectural, atmospheric, etc.), ideas, occurrences, and images encountered in art and literature.
dog horse motivation
Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is--both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology--of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
peers hints life-is
Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.