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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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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
Law
Distinction
Actuality
Whether
Awake
Transitory
Desire
Permanent
Appearances
Dream
Appearance
Confess
Real
Laws
Recognise
Life
Products
Asleep
Environment
External
Powering
Brain
Affect
Actualities

More quotes by H. P. Lovecraft

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To me there is nothing more fraught with mystery & terror than a remote Massachusetts farmhouse against a lonely hill. Where else could an outbreak like the Salem witchcraft have occurred?
H. P. Lovecraft
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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
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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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You see them? You see the things that float and flop about you and through you ever moment of your life? You see the creatures that form what men call the pure air and the blue sky? Have I not succeeded in breaking down the barrier have I not shown you worlds that no other living men have seen?
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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What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!
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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The cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see.
H. P. Lovecraft
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There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.
H. P. Lovecraft
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incurable lover of the grotesque
H. P. Lovecraft
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But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
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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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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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
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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
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I felt myself on the edge of the world peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.
H. P. Lovecraft
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The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.
H. P. Lovecraft
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It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.
H. P. Lovecraft
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Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.
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