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H. P. Lovecraft

14 free books by H. P. Lovecraft. 14 you can read right here.

Born 1890 in Providence · Died 1937 in Providence

writer, novelist, poet, essayist, journalist · United States

Notable works: The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, At the Mountains of Madness, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, The Cats of Ulthar

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Facts from Wikidata (Q169566), retrieved 2026-09-26.

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Short stories and shorter works by H. P. Lovecraft

Quotes from H. P. Lovecraft’s books

Verified word for word in the text: each quote is copied exactly from the book’s text in this site’s reader (the Project Gutenberg e-text named under each book) and links to its passage; when this page was built, every quote was checked word for word against that text. How RedLectern is built.

At the mountains of madness

From Project Gutenberg e-text #70652 (public domain in the USA).

Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded--run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!

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What we did see--for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned--was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist's 'thing that should not be'; and its nearest comprehensible analogue is a vast, onrushing subway train as one sees it from a station platform--the great black front looming colossally out of infinite subterraneous distance, constellated with strangely colored lights and filling the prodigious burrow.

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The call of Cthulhu

From Project Gutenberg e-text #68283 (public domain in the USA).

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

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"In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming."

— Spoken by a character

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The Dunwich horror

From Project Gutenberg e-text #50133 (public domain in the USA).

Two centuries ago, when talk of witch-blood, Satan-worship, and strange forest presences was not laughed at, it was the custom to give reasons for avoiding the locality.

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It was his twin brother, but it looked more like the father than he did.

— Spoken by a character · 10

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