Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Certain of Poe's tales possess an almost absolute perfection of artistic form which makes them veritable beacon-lights in the province of the short story. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Makes
Story
Short
Related Quotes:
" I am disillusioned enough to know that no man's opinion on any subject is worth a damn unless backed up with enough genuine information to make him really know what he's talking about. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Information
I Am
Opinion
" To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Which
Depressing
Joy
" Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Few
Minds
Normal
" There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Thoughts
Life
Children
" 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. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Story
First
Always
" There are, I think, four distinct types of weird story: one expressing a mood or feeling, another expressing a pictorial conception, a third expressing a general situation, condition, legend or intellectual conception, and a fourth explaining a definite tableau or specific dramatic situation or climax. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Legend
Story
Think
" 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. "
H. P. Lovecraft
People
You
Together
" The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Joke
Comic
Mankind
" All rationalism tends to minimalise the value and the importance of life and to decrease the sum total of human happiness. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Happiness
Value
Sum Total
" It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let 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. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Peace
Black
Life
" We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Infinity
Island
Ignorance
" My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored and listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Nervous
I Am
Bored
" Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Haunt
Far
Strange
" Throw a stick, and the servile dog wheezes and pants and shambles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Cat
You
Will
" That metre itself forms an essential part of all true poetry is a principle which not even the assertions of an Aristotle or the pronouncements of a Plato can disestablish. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Plato
Even
Poetry
" We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake. To preserve civilisation, we must deal scientifically with the brute element, using only genuine biological principles. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Long
Man
Nature
" Horror and the unknown or the strange are always closely connected so that it is hard to create a convincing picture of shattered natural law or cosmic alienage or 'outsideness' without laying stress on the emotion of fear. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Stress
Picture
Law
" No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination be thought of as even slightly ungraceful - a record against which must be pitted the depressing spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless and shaggy Airedales, and the like. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Like
Even
Cats
" 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. Lovecraft
Man
Culture
Great
" A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone, and he does not know what to do except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Dog
Him
Know
" 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. "
H. P. Lovecraft
People
Think
I Am
" Children, old crones, peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Dogs
Stick
Cats
" The monotony of a long heroic poem may often be pleasantly relieved by judicious interruptions in the perfect succession of rhymes, just as the metre may sometimes be adorned with occasional triplets and Alexandrines. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Poem
Long
Perfect
" Imagination is a very potent thing, and in the uneducated often usurps the place of genuine experience. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Genuine
Experience
Place
" 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. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Live
Furniture
Week
" It is easy to remove the mind from harping on the lost illusion of immortality. The disciplined intellect fears nothing and craves no sugar-plum at the day's end, but is content to accept life and serve society as best it may. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Mind
Day
Best
" In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of rational evidence, I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist. "
H. P. Lovecraft
I Am
Appearance
Am
" Blue, green, grey, white, or black; smooth, ruffled, or mountainous; that ocean is not silent. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Green
Black
White
" Write out the story - rapidly, fluently, and not too critically - following the second or narrative-order synopsis. Change incidents and plot whenever the developing process seems to suggest such change, never being bound by any previous design. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Design
Change
Story
" 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. "
H. P. Lovecraft
Mind
Reason
Great