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.
Life is a hideous thing.
Someday our piecing together of knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas we shall either go mad or flee into the safety of a new dark age.
The ignorant and the deluded are, I think, in a strange way to be envied. That which is not known of does not trouble us, while an imagined but insubstantial peril does not harm us. To know the truths behind reality is a far greater burden.
Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.
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.
In London there is a man who screams when the church bells ring.
Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed.
Memories and possibilities are even more hideous than realities.
But more wonderful than the lore of old men and the lore of books is the secret lore of ocean.
Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.
The only saving grace of the present is that it’s too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.
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.
Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.
It is better to laugh at man from outside the universe, than to weep for him within.
The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
An isolated person requires correspondence as a means of seeing his ideas as others see them, and thus guarding against the dogmatisms and extravagances of solitary and uncorrected speculation.
I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim, Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge, or lustre, or name.