When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
Uncertainty and danger are always closely allied, thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities.
All I want is to know things. The black gulph of the infinite is before me...
The greatest human achievements have never been for profit.
My opinion of my whole experience varies from time to time.
In short, the world abounds with simple delusions which we may call “happiness”, if we be but able to entertain them.
Religion as a vital issue is dead except on paper, and whatever beauty-baiting the future may witness will be the work of greed and trade, and not of honest cosmos-facing.
Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.
Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects.
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.
Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal.
I could not help feeling that they were evil things – mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.
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!
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
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.
We love kitties, gawd bless their little whiskers, and we don’t give a damn whether they or we are superior or inferior! They’re confounded pretty, and that’s all we know and all we need to know!
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.
I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.
There are probably seven persons, in all, who really like my work; and they are enough. I should write even if I were the only patient reader, for my aim is merely self-expression.