The man or nation of high culture may acknowledge to great lengths the restraints imposed by conventions and honour, but beyond a certain point, primitive will or desire cannot be curbed.
H. P. LOVECRAFTMy nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me.
More H. P. Lovecraft Quotes
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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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Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts.
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The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
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Heaven knows where I’ll end up – but it’s a safe bet that I’ll never be at the top of anything! Nor do I particularly care to be.
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I am essentially a recluse who will have very little to do with people wherever he may be. I think that most people only make me nervous – that only by accident, and in extremely small quantities, would I ever be likely to come across people who wouldn’t.
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It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared – as it always should be.
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Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous.
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The most merciful thing in the world, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
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Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
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Orthodox Christianity, by playing upon the emotions of man, is able to accomplish wonders toward keeping him in order and relieving his mind. It can frighten or cajole him away from evil more effectively than could reason.
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Fear is our deepest and strongest emotion, and the one which best lends itself to the creation of nature-defying illusions.
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The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
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The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous.
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One cannot be too careful in the selection of adjectives for descriptions. Words or compounds which describe precisely, and which convey exactly the right suggestions to the mind of the reader, are essential.
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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.
H. P. LOVECRAFT