West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep woods that no axe has ever cut.
I now saw plainly that this foul emanation could have no admixture or connection whatsoever with the clean air of the Libyan Desert, but must be essentially a thing vomited from sinister gulfs still lower down.
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.
And as the wind died away I was plunged into the ghoul-pooled darkness of earth's bowels; for behind the last of the creatures the great brazen door clanged shut with a deafening peal of metallic music whose reverberations swelled out to the distant world to hail the rising sun as Memnon hails it from the banks of the Nile.
You cannot oppose what you cannot see or feel. You cannot oppose the thousand-dimensional. Suppose they should eat their way to us through space!
If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set first to his clothing one night.
These things should be left to the frigid and impersonal investigator, for they offer two equally tragic alternatives to the man of feeling and action; despair if he fail in his quest, and terrors unutterable and unimaginable if he succeed.
Sometimes, I believe that this less material life [of dreams] is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.
Denied anything ardently desired, the individual or state will argue and parley just so long - then, if the impelling motive be sufficiently great, will cast aside every rule and break down every acquired inhibition, plunging viciously after the object wished; all the more fantastically savage because of previous repression.
The reason why time plays a great part in so many of my tales is that this element looms up in my mind as the most profoundly dramatic and grimly terrible thing in the universe.
The Thing cannot be described—there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled.
The region now entered by the police was one of traditionally evil repute, substantially unknown and untraversed by white men.
Shoot Dr. Allen on sight and dissolve his body in acid. Don't burn it.
It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.
All they ever did was clutch and fly and tickle; that was the way of night-gaunts.
Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!
Original title Al Azif—azif being the word used by Arabs to designate that nocturnal sound (made by insects) suppos'd to be the howling of daemons.
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
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.
I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living.
Then the germ of panic seemed to spread among the seekers. It was one thing to chase the nameless entity, but quite another to find it. Spells might be all right—but suppose they weren't?
Sometimes one feels that it would be merciful to tear down these houses, for they must often dream.
Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point.
If I could create an ideal world, it would be an England with the fire of the Elizabethans, the correct taste of the Georgians, and the refinement and pure ideals of the Victorians.
The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
Copp's Hill Burying Ground, which could not be many blocks away from this very house, was a favourite scene.
All of my tales are based on the fundamental premise that common human laws and emotions have no validity or significance in the cosmos-at-large.
Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum.
One superlatively important effect of wide reading is the enlargement of vocabulary which always accompanies it.
I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.
So for generations did the sainted skull of Caius Anicius Magnus Furius Camillus Æmilianus Cornelius Valerius Pompeius Julius Ibidus, consul of Rome, favourite of emperors, and saint of the Romish church, lie hidden beneath the soil of a growing town.
Allen was perhaps a similar case, and may have persuaded the youth into accepting him as an avatar of the long-dead Curwen.
I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below.
It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.
Methought its spirit whispered evil counsel, soothing me to traitorous somnolence with a damnable rhythmical promise which it repeated over and over.
Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage.
I couldn't live a week without a private library - indeed, I'd part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I'd let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
If heaven is merciful, it will some day efface from my consciousness the sight that I saw, and let me live my last years in peace.
In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.
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.
It is not unusual for the central menace of a work of horror fiction to be interpreted as a metaphor for the larger fears of a society.
You drug me, and then ask me to walk! Frank, you're as unreasonable as an artist.
By necessity practical and by philosophy stern, these folk were not beautiful in their sins.
The subject, a widely known architect with leanings toward theosophy and occultism, went violently insane on the date of young Wilcox's seizure, and expired several months later after incessant screamings to be saved from some escaped denizen of hell.
It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplained couplet: That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
All the terror I had dimly felt before rushed upon me actively and vividly, and I knew that I loathed the ancient and abhorrent creature so near me with an infinite intensity.
Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts.
Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end.
My youngest boy went mad. He sits drooling on the porch, trying to play the cat like an accordion. He's been scratched some.
