Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.

— H.P. Lovecraft

Warped and bigoted with preconceived illusions of justice, freedom, and consistency, they cast off the old lore and the old way with the old beliefs; nor ever stopped to think that the lore and those ways were the sole makers of their present thoughts and judgments, and the sole guides and standards in a meaningless universe without fixed aims or stable points of reference.

— H.P. Lovecraft

We all know that any emotional bias -- irrespective of truth or falsity -- can be implanted by suggestion in the emotions of the young, hence the inherited traditions of an orthodox community are absolutely without evidential value.... If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences. With such an honest and inflexible openness to evidence, they could not fail to receive any real truth which might be manifesting itself around them. The fact that religionists do not follow this honorable course, but cheat at their game by invoking juvenile quasi-hypnosis, is enough to destroy their pretensions in my eyes even if their absurdity were not manifest in every other direction.

— H.P. Lovecraft

We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.

— H.P. Lovecraft

Well did the traveler know those garden lands that lie betwixt the wood of the Carnelian Sea, and blithely did he follow the singing river Outranks that marked his course. The sun rose higher over gentle slopes of grove and lawn, and heightened the colors of the thousand flowers that starred each knoll and dangle. A blessed haze lies upon all this region, wherein is held a little more of the sunlight than other places hold, and a little more of the summer's humming music of birds and bees; so that men walk through it as through a fairy place, and feel greater joy and wonder than they ever afterward remember.

— H.P. Lovecraft

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

While my chosen form of story-writing is obviously a special and perhaps a narrow one, it is nonetheless a persistent and permanent type of expression, as old as literature itself. There will always be a certain small percentage of persons who feel a burning curiosity about unknown outer space, and a burning desire to escape from the prison-house of the known and the real into those enchanted lands of incredible adventure and infinite possibilities which dreams open up to us, and which things like deep woods, fantastic urban towers, and flaming sunsets momentarily suggest.

— H.P. Lovecraft

Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.

— H.P. Lovecraft

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