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" Plots may be simple or complex, but suspense, and climactic progress from one incident to another, are essential. Every incident in a fictional work should have some bearing on the climax or denouement, and any denouement which is not the inevitable result of the preceding incidents is awkward and unliterary. "

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" The sole ultimate factor in human decisions is physical force. This we must learn, however repugnant the idea may seem, if we are to protect ourselves and our institutions. Reliance on anything else is fallacious and ruinous. "

H. P. Lovecraft

Human

Protect

Learn

" Man's respect for the imponderables varies according to his mental constitution and environment. Through certain modes of thought and training, it can be elevated tremendously, yet there is always a limit. "

" But are not the dreams of poets and the tales of travellers notoriously false? "

" From my experience, I cannot doubt but that man, when lost to terrestrial consciousness, is indeed sojourning in another and uncorporeal life of far different nature from the life we know; and of which only the slightest and most indistinct memories linger after waking. "

" 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. "

" Toil without song is like a weary journey without an end. "

" To me, there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form - and local human passions and conditions and standards - are depicted as native to other worlds and universes. "

" 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. "

" From even the greatest of horrors, irony is seldom absent. "

" 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. "

" An excellent habit to cultivate is the analytical study of the King James Bible. For simple yet rich and forceful English, this masterly production is hard to equal; and even though its Saxon vocabulary and poetic rhythm be unsuited to general composition, it is an invaluable model for writers on quaint or imaginative themes. "

" We should perceive that man's period of historical existence, a period so short that his physical constitution has not been altered in the slightest degree, is insufficient to allow of any considerable mental change. "

" Very few minds are strictly normal, and all religious fanatics are marked with abnormalities of various sorts. "

" I do not think that any realism is beautiful. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness. "

" 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. "

" No formal course in fiction-writing can equal a close and observant perusal of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe or Ambrose Bierce. "

H. P. Lovecraft

Stories

Course

" The 'punch' of a truly weird tale is simply some violation or transcending of fixed cosmic law - an imaginative escape from palling reality - hence, phenomena rather than persons are the logical 'heroes.' "

" 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

Even

Cats

" Indeed, there is much in pure humanitarian culture, as opposed to rigid scientific training, which encourages absorption in the affairs of mankind, and more or less indifference to the unfathomed abysses of star-strown space that yawn interminably about this terrestrial grain of dust. "

H. P. Lovecraft

Space

Pure

" I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors. "

" Personally, I would not care for immortality in the least. There is nothing better than oblivion, since in oblivion there is no wish unfulfilled. We had it before we were born yet did not complain. Shall we whine because we know it will return? It is Elysium enough for me, at any rate. "

H. P. Lovecraft

Care

Wish

" The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" It is only the forcible propagation of conventional Christianity that makes the agnostic so bitter toward the church. He knows that all the doctrines cannot possibly be true, but he would view them with toleration if he were asked merely to let them alone for the benefit of the masses whom they can help and succour. "

" 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. "