The collection / 129 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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01Undated

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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02Undated

I have seen the dark universe yawningWhere the black planets roll without aim,Where they roll in their horror unheeded,Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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03Undated

There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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04Undated

Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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05Undated

The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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06Undated

I could not help feeling that they were evil things-- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss. That seething , half-luminous cloud-background held ineffable suggestions of a vague, ethereal beyondness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and aeon-long death of this untrodden and unfathomed austral world.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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07Undated

There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When that happens, the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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08Undated

I'll tell you something of the forbidden horrors she led me into - something of the age-old horrors that even now are festering in out-of-the-way corners with a few monstrous priests to keep them alive. Some people know things about the universe that nobody ought to know, and can do things that nobody ought to be able to do.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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09Undated

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!

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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10Undated

For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance - or identity - were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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11Undated

He talked about terrible meetings in lonely places, of cyclopean ruins in the heart of the Maine woods beneath which vast staircases led down to abysses of nighted secrets, of complex angles that led through invisible walls to other regions of space and time, and of hideous exchanges of personality that permitted explorations in remote and forbidden places, on other worlds, and in different space-time continua.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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12Undated

As I shivered and brooded on the casting of that brain-blasting shadow, I knew that I had at last pried out one of earth's supreme horors-one of those nameless blights of outer voids whose faint demon scratchings we sometimes hear on the farthest rim of space, yet from which our own finite vision has given us a merciful immunity.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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13Undated

By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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14Undated

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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15Undated

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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16Undated

Only a cynic can create horror--for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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17Undated

Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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18Undated

Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”— “Supernatural Horror in Literature

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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19Undated

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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20Undated

Damn it, it wasn’t quite fresh enough!

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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21Undated

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!

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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22Undated

No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of ide

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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23Undated

As we drew nearer the green shore the bearded man told me of that land, the Land of Zar, where dwell all the dreams and thoughts of beauty that come to men once and then are forgotten. And when I looked upon the terraces again I saw that what he said was true, for among the sights before me were many things I had once seen through the mists beyond the horizon and in the phosphorescent depths of the ocean.

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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24Undated

It cannot be described, this awesome chain of events that depopulated the whole Earth; the range is too tremendous for any to picture of encompass. Of the people of Earth's unfortunate ages, billions of years before, only a few prophets and madman could have conceived that which was to come - could have grasped visions of the still, dead lands, and long-empty sea-beds. The rest would have doubted... doubted alike the shadow of change upon the planet and the shadow of doom upon the race. For man has always thought himself the immortal master of natural things...

H.P. Lovecraft / quote

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