Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
All life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other.
In search of Truth the hopeful zealot goes,But all the sadder tums, the more he knows!
I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,And with strange aeons even death may die.
If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set first to his clothing one night.
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.
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.
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.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
It might, too, have been the singular cold that alienated me; for such chilliness was abnormal on so hot a day, and the abnormal always excites aversion, distrust, and fear.
For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming…
But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false?
When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
We are all roamers of vast spaces and travelers in many ages.
Heaven knows where I’ll end up – it’s a safe bet I’ll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
I shall never be very merry or very sad, for I am more prone to analyse than to feel.
Outside, across the putrid moat and under the dark mute trees, I would often lie and dream for hours about what I read in the books; and would longingly picture myself amidst gay crowds in the sunny world beyond the endless forests.
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
It is good to be a cynic — it is better to be a contented cat — and it is best not to exist at all.
From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.
I have seen the dark universe yawningWhere the black planets roll without aim,Where they roll in their horror unheeded,Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.
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.
Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity.
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.
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.
The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!
For the things in the chair, perfect to the last, subtle detail of microscopic resemblance – or identity – were the face and hands of Henry Wentworth Akeley.
By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.
In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.
Only a cynic can create horror–for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
Perhaps I should not hope to convey in mere words the unutterable hideousness that can dwell in absolute silence and barren immensity.
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.
No death, no doom, no anguish can arouse the surpassing despair which flows from a loss of ide
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 world to sow death and madness. . . .
But of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets.
It’s hard to have done all one’s growing up since 33 — but that’s a damn sight better than not growing up at all.
Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race’s mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!
Through all this horror my cat stalked unperturbed. Once I saw him monstrously perched atop a mountain of bones, and wondered at the secrets that might lie behind his yellow eyes.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.
The cat . . . is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe.
The cool, lithe, cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops.
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west.
Atal felt a spectral change in the air, as if the laws of earth were bowing to greater laws.
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..
Success is a relative thing―and the victory of a boy at marbles is equal to the victory of an Octavius at Actium when measured by the scale of cosmic infinity.