Quote

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.

H. P. Lovecraft

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Behind
Thousandfold
Truth
Peer
Sometimes
Hints
Thing
Hideous
Make
Peers
Life
Background
Backgrounds
Behinds

More quotes by H. P. Lovecraft

Image
Man's relations to man do not captivate my fancy. It is man's relation to the cosmos--to the unknown--which alone arouses in me the spark of creative imagination.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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
Image
I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror,and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it--and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order ... defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law ... are concerned.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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
Image
Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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
Image
In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
To be bitter is to attribute intent and personality to the formless, infinite, unchanging and unchangeable void. We drift on a chartless, resistless sea. Let us sing when we can, and forget the rest.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
Good and evil and beauty and ugliness are only ornamental fruits of perspective, whose sole value lies in their linkage to what chance made our fathers think and feel, and whose finer details are different for every race and culture.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. The chance's of theism's truth being to my mind so microscopically small, I would be a pedant and a hypocrite to call myself anything else.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
The unknown ... became for our primitive forefathers a terrible and omnipotent source of boons and calamities visited upon mankind for cryptic and wholly extra-terrestrial reasons, and thus clearly belonging to spheres of existence whereof we know nothing and wherein we have no part.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
H. P. Lovecraft
Image
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