H. P. Lovecraft quotes

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that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded--run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!

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.

Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn--whatever they had been, they were men!

At the time, his shrieks were confined to the repetition of a single, mad word of all too obvious source: "Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response.

It was a terrible, indescribable thing, vaster than any subway train--a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter.

Less than a fortnight later we left the last hint of polar land behind us and thanked heaven that we were clear of a haunted, accursed realm where life and death, space and time, have made black and blasphemous alliances in the unknown epochs since matter first writhed and swam on the planet's scarce-cooled crust.

They had not been even savages--for what indeed had they done? That awful awakening in the cold of an unknown epoch--perhaps an attack by the furry, frantically barking quadrupeds, and a dazed defense against them and the equally frantic white simians with the queer wrappings and paraphernalia!

We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spur others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown.

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

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

— Spoken by a character

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R'lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them.

The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by.

A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant?

The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own.

After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

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.

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

— Spoken by a character · 10

Yet all this was only the prologue of the actual Dunwich horror.

They's allus ben unseen things araound Dunwich--livin' things--as ain't human an' ain't good fer human folks.

— Spoken by a character · 7

That the kind of fear here treated is purely spiritual--that it is strong in proportion as it is objectless on earth, that it predominates in the period of our sinless infancy--are difficulties the solution of which might afford some probable insight into our ante-mundane condition, and a peep at least into the shadowland of pre-existence."--Charles Lamb: Witches and Other Night-Fears.

— Spoken by a character

The bent, goatish giant before him seemed like the spawn of another planet or dimension; like something only partly of mankind, and linked to black gulfs of essence and entity that stretch like titan fantasms beyond all spheres of force and matter, space and time.

Noises in the hills continued to be reported from year to year, and still form a puzzle to geologists and physiographers.

In our sensible age--since the Dunwich horror of 1928 was hushed up by those who had the town's and the world's welfare at heart--people shun it without knowing exactly why.

Wilbur was never subsequently seen alive and conscious without complete and tightly buttoned attire, the disarrangement or threatened disarrangement of which always seemed to fill him with anger and alarm.

It was--well, it was mostly a kind of force that doesn't belong in our part of space; a kind of force that acts and grows and shapes itself by other laws than those of our sort of Nature.

— Spoken by a character · 10