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Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability.

H. P. Lovecraft

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H. P. Lovecraft
Age: 46 †
Born: 1890
Born: August 20
Died: 1937
Died: March 15
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Howard Phillips Lovecraft
H.P. Lovecraft
Lovecraft
Ward Phillips
HP Lovecraft
Richard Raleigh
Edgar Softly
Augustus T. Swift
Lewis Theobald
Jr.
Albert Frederick Willie
Humphrey Littlewit
Hidden
Behinds
Behind
Mutability
Wonder
Changeless
Pleasure
Lurks
Inspirational
Unexplored
Thing
Superficial
Life
Unexpected

More quotes by H. P. Lovecraft

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Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Any magazine-cover hack can splash paint around wildly and call it a nightmare, or a witches sabbath or a portrait of the devil but only a great painter can make such a thing really scare or ring true. That's because only a real artist knows the anatomy of the terrible, or the physiology of fear.
H. P. Lovecraft
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I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about.
H. P. Lovecraft
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No new horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace.
H. P. Lovecraft
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I never cheat or steal. Also, I never wear a top-hat with a sack coat or munch bananas in public on the streets, because a gentleman does not do those things either. I would as soon do the one as the other sort of thing--it is all a matter of harmony and good taste.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Race prejudice is a gift of nature, intended to preserve in purity the various divisions of mankind which the ages have evolved.
H. P. Lovecraft
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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
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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.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic - the abnormally chromatic entity in The Colour Out of Space being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other.
H. P. Lovecraft
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The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
H. P. Lovecraft
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I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla.
H. P. Lovecraft
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I expect nothing of man, and disown the race. The only folly is expecting what is never attained man is most contemptible when compared with his own pretensions. It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Man is an essentially superstitious and fearful animal. Take away the herd's Christian gods and saints and they will without failing come to worship...something else.
H. P. Lovecraft
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If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
H. P. Lovecraft
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With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos, yet other beings with wider, stronger, or different range of senses might not only see very differently the things we see, but might see and study whole worlds of matter, energy, and life which lie close at hand yet can never be detected with the senses we have.
H. P. Lovecraft
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It is the night-black Massachusetts legendry which packs the really macabre kick. Here is material for a really profound study in group-neuroticism for certainly, no one can deny the existence of a profoundly morbid streak in the Puritan imagination.
H. P. Lovecraft
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There now ensued a series of incidents which transported me to the opposite extremes of ecstasy and horror incidents which I tremble to recall and dare not seek to interpret.
H. P. Lovecraft
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I know always that I am an outsider a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone perhaps more alone than he can realise.
H. P. Lovecraft