I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

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 baldness far more than terrestrially spatial; and gave appalling reminders of the utter remoteness, separateness, desolation, and Leon-long death of this untrod den and unfathomed austral world.

— H.P. Lovecraft

I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!

— H.P. Lovecraft

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur German did; and Arthur German soaked himself in oil and set first to his clothing one night.

— H.P. Lovecraft

I have seen beyond the bounds of infinity and drawn down daemons from the stars. . . . I have harnessed the shadows that stride from world to sow death and madness. . . .

— H.P. Lovecraft

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

— H.P. Lovecraft

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