To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form – and local human passions and conditions and standards – are depicted as native to other worlds and universes.
H. P. LOVECRAFTImagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience.
More H. P. Lovecraft Quotes
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That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish.
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Adulthood is hell.
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My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.
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Cosmic terror appears as an ingredient of the earliest folklore of all races and is crystallised in the most archaic ballads, chronicles, and sacred writings.
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Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. But, since all this knowledge of our limitations cannot possibly be of any value to us, it is better to ignore it in our daily conduct of life.
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I could not write about ‘ordinary people’ because I am not in the least interested in them.
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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.
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No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce.
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I have concluded that Literature is no proper pursuit for a gentleman and that Writing ought never to be consider’d but as an elegant Accomplishment to be indulg’d in with infrequency and Discrimination.
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We shall see that at which dogs howl in the dark, and that at which cats prick up their ears after midnight.
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Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts.
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Atmosphere, not action, is the great desideratum of weird fiction. Indeed, all that a wonder story can ever be is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood.
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Truth is of no practical value to mankind save as it affects terrestrial phenomena, hence the discoveries of science should be concealed or glossed over wherever they conflict with orthodoxy.
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The cat is classic whilst the dog is Gothic – nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae.
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In writing a weird story, I always try very carefully to achieve the right mood and atmosphere and place the emphasis where it belongs.
H. P. LOVECRAFT