No amount of rationalisation, reform, or Freudian analysis can quite annul the thrill of the chimney-corner whisper or the lonely wood.
So far as English versification is concerned, Pope was the world, and all the world was Pope.
I love to dream, but I never try to dream and think at the same time.
All my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and interests and emotions have no validity or significance in the vast cosmos-at-large.
It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.
If we were sensible we would seek death – the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.
Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.
Something like fear chilled me as I sat there in the small hours alone-I say alone, for one who sits by a sleeper is indeed alone; perhaps more alone than he can realise.
The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that is seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilized cynic to do other than to worship it.
The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound – and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.
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.
Yog-Sothoth knows the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the gate. Yog-Sothoth is the key and guardian of the gate. Past, present, future, all are one in Yog-Sothoth.
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.
With hidden powers of unknown extent apparently at his disposal, Curwen was not a man who could safely be warned to leave town.
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
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.
There were nameless horrors abroad; and no matter how little one might be able to get at them, one ought tp stand prepared for any sort of action at any time.
Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word “eldritch” so many times now that I think about it...
That which we call substance and reality is shadow and illusion, and that which we call shadow and illusion is substance and reality.
Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment.