H. P. Lovecraft citations (206 citations, Page 5)

H. P. Lovecraft: 206 citations0 J'aime

H. P. Lovecraft citations célèbres

“Il a dû être piégé par le naufrage alors qu'il se trouvait dans sa noire citadelle, sinon, à l'heure qu'il est, le monde entier hurlerait de terreur. Qui peut prévoir la fin? Ce qui a surgi peut disparaître, et ce qui a sombré peut surgir à nouveau. L'abjection attend son heure en rêvant au fond de la mer, et la mort plane sur les cités chancelantes des hommes. Un jour viendra - mais non, je ne dois ni ne puis y penser!”

H. P. Lovecraft livre The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

“La fin est toute proche. J'entends un bruit à ma porte.”

H. P. Lovecraft

Dagon

“C'est dans un état bien particulier que j'écris ces mots, puisque cette nuit je ne serai plus.”

H. P. Lovecraft

Dagon

H. P. Lovecraft: Citations en anglais

“It is because the cosmos is meaningless that we must secure our individual illusions of values, direction, and interest by upholding the artificial streams which give us such worlds of salutary illusion. That is—since nothing means anything in itself, we must preserve the proximate and arbitrary background which makes things around us seem as if they did mean something. In other words, we are either Englishmen or nothing whatever.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to James F. Morton (6 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 208
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

“I can look back... at two distinct periods of opinion whose foundations I have successively come to distrust—a period before 1919 or so, when the weight of classic authority unduly influenced me, and another period from 1919 to about 1925, when I placed too high a value on the elements of revolt, florid colour, and emotional extravagance or intensity.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to August Derleth (1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 307
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth

“My theological beliefs are likely to startle one who has imagined me as an orthodox adherent of the Anglican Church. My father was of that faith, and was married by its rites, yet, having been educated in my mother's distinctively Yankee family, I was early placed in the Baptist sunday school. There, however, I soon became exasperated by the literal Puritanical doctrines, and constantly shocked my preceptors by expressing scepticism of much that was taught me. It became evident that my young mind was not of a religious cast, for the much exhorted "simple faith" in miracles and the like came not to me. I was not long forced to attend the Sunday school, but read much in the Bible from sheer interest. The more I read the Scriptures, the more foreign they seemed to me. I was infinitely fonder on the Graeco-Roman mythology, and when I was eight astounded the family by declaring myself a Roman pagan. Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other. I had really adopted a sort of Pantheism, with the Roman gods as personified attributes of deity.... My present opinions waver betwixt Pantheism and rationalism. I am a sort of agnostic, neither affirming nor denying anything.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Maurice W. Moe (16 January 1915), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 10
Non-Fiction, Letters

“As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to C.L. Moore (August 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 574
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Moreover, humour is itself but a superficial view of that which is in truth both tragic and terrible—the contrast between human pretence and cosmic mechanical reality. Humour is but the faint terrestrial echo of the hideous laughter of the blind mad gods that squat leeringly and sardonically in caverns beyond the Milky Way. It is a hollow thing, sweet on the outside, but filled with the pathos of fruitless aspiration. All great humorists are sad—Mark Twain was a cynic and agnostic, and wrote "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What Is Man?" When I was younger I wrote humorous matter—satire and light verse—and was known to many as a jester and parodist. … But I cannot help seeing beyond the tinsel of humour, and recognising the pitiful basis of jest—the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

"The Defence Remains Open!" (April 1921), published in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 54
Non-Fiction

“There was a night when winds from unknown spaces whirled us irresistibly into limitless vacum beyond all thought and entity. Perceptions of the most maddeningly untransmissible sort thronged upon us; perceptions of infinity which at the time convulsed us with joy, yet which are now partly lost to my memory and partly incapable of presentation to others.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, Hypnos (1922)

“I am distinctly opposed to visibly arrogant and arbitrary extremes of government—but this is simply because I wish the safety of an artistic and intellectual civilisation to be secure, not because I have any sympathy with the coarse-grained herd who would menace the civilisation if not placated by sops. Surely you can see the profound and abysmal difference between this emotional attitude and the attitude of the democratic reformer who becomes wildly excited over the "wrongs of the masses". This reformer has uppermost in his mind the welfare of those masses themselves—he feels with them, takes up a mental-emotional point of view as one of them, regards their advancement as his prime objective independently of anything else, and would willingly sacrifice the finest fruits of the civilisation for the sake of stuffing their bellies and giving them two cinema shows instead of one per day. I, on the other hand, don't give a hang about the masses except so far as I think deliberate cruelty is coarse and unaesthetic—be it towards horses, oxen, undeveloped men, dogs, negroes, or poultry. All that I care about is the civilisation—the state of development and organisation which is capable of gratifying the complex mental-emotional-aesthetic needs of highly evolved and acutely sensitive men. Any indignation I may feel in the whole matter is not for the woes of the downtrodden, but for the threat of social unrest to the traditional institutions of the civilisation. The reformer cares only for the masses, but may make concessions to the civilisation. I care only for the civilisation, but may make concessions to the masses. Do you not see the antipodal difference between the two positions? Both the reformer and I may unite in opposing an unworkably arrogant piece of legislation, but the motivating reasons will be absolutely antithetical. He wants to give the crowd as much as can be given them without wrecking all semblance of civilisation, whereas I want to give them only as much as can be given them without even slightly impairing the level of national culture. … He works for as democratic a government as possible; I for as aristocratic a one as possible.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

But both recognise the limitations of possibility.
Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 289-290
Non-Fiction, Letters

“It is just as ridiculous to get excited & hysterical over a coming cultural change as to get excited & hysterical over one's physical aging... There is legitimate pathos about both processes; but blame & rebellion are essentially cheap, because inappropriate, emotions... It is wholly appropriate to feel a deep sadness at the coming of unknown things & the departure of those around which all our symbolic associations are entwined. All life is fundamentally & inextricably sad, with the perpetual snatching away of all the chance combinations of image & vista & mood that we become attached to, & the perpetual encroachment of the shadow of decay upon illusions of expansion & liberation which buoyed us up & spurred us on in youth. That is why I consider all jauntiness, & many forms of carelessly generalised humour, as essentially cheap & mocking, & occasionally ghastly & corpselike. Jauntiness & non-ironic humour in this world of basic & inescapable sadness are like the hysterical dances that a madman might execute on the grave of all his hopes. But if, at one extreme, intellectual poses of spurious happiness be cheap & disgusting; so at the other extreme are all gestures & fist-clenchings of rebellion equally silly & inappropriate—if not quite so overtly repulsive. All these things are ridiculous & contemptible because they are not legitimately applicable... The sole sensible way to face the cosmos & its essential sadness (an adumbration of true tragedy which no destruction of values can touch) is with manly resignation—eyes open to the real facts of perpetual frustration, & mind & sense alert to catch what little pleasure there is to be caught during one's brief instant of existence. Once we know, as a matter of course, how nature inescapably sets our freedom-adventure-expansion desires, & our symbol-&-experience-affections, definitely beyond all zones of possible fulfilment, we are in a sense fortified in advance, & able to endure the ordeal of consciousness with considerable equanimity... Life, if well filled with distracting images & activities favourable to the ego's sense of expansion, freedom, & adventurous expectancy, can be very far from gloomy—& the best way to achieve this condition is to get rid of the unnatural conceptions which make conscious evils out of impersonal and inevitable limitations... get rid of these, & of those false & unattainable standards which breed misery & mockery through their beckoning emptiness.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 291
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

“[W]hat I used to respect was not really aristocracy, but a set of personal qualities which aristocracy then developed better than any other system... a set of qualities, however, whose merit lay only in a psychology of non-calculative, non-competitive disinterestedness, truthfulness, courage, and generosity fostered by good education, minimum economic stress, and assumed position, AND JUST AS ACHIEVABLE THROUGH SOCIALISM AS THROUGH ARISTOCRACY.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to C.L. Moore (c. mid-October 1936), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 566
Non-Fiction, Letters

“I endorse all that you say of the superior intelligence of the felidae. Never have I been able to associate the docile servility and satellitism of the canidae with mental power. Zoölogists seem to consider the cerebration of cats and dogs about 50-50—but my respect always goes to the cool, sure, impersonal, delicately poised feline who minds his business and never slobbers—the aristocratic, epicurean philosopher who knows what he wants and tells interlopers to go to hell. There is no credit in having a dog attached to one—for a dog can be conditioned to become anybody's slave and property. But a cat is nobody's slave. You do not own a cat. If one lives in your home, it is because he regards your way of life favourably, and accepts you as a friend, as one gentleman accepts another. He takes no kicks or insolence from anyone. If you are not worthy to associate with him, he will depart to seek an environment more suited to a gentleman's taste. Therefore he who retains the respect and companionship of a feline has proven himself to be essentially a superior citizen. For a human being, membership in the Kappa Alpha Tau forms a badge of distinction. Many are the eminent names on that member ship list—Mahomet himself, Richelieu, Poe, Baudelaire... one could catalogue them endlessly. Certainly, I ask no greater honour than to be accounted a citizen of Ulthar beyond the River Skai!”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (29 July 1936), published in Selected Letters Vol. V, p. 290
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

“good art means the ability of any one man to pin down in some permanent and intelligible medium a sort of idea of what he sees in Nature that nobody else sees. In other words, to make the other fellow grasp, through skilled selective care in interpretative reproduction or symbolism, some inkling of what only the artist himself could possibly see in the actual objective scene itself.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 487
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist—that is, I don't make the mistake of thinking that the resultant of the natural forces surrounding and governing organic life will have any connexion with the wishes or tastes of any part of that organic life-process. Pessimists are just as illogical as optimists; insomuch as both envisage the aims of mankind as unified, and as having a direct relationship (either of frustration or of fulfilment) to the inevitable flow of terrestrial motivation and events. That is—both schools retain in a vestigial way the primitive concept of a conscious teleology—of a cosmos which gives a damn one way or the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitos, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to James F. Morton (1929), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 483
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

“Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question—he has anatomical features consistently varying from those of other stocks, & always in the direction of the lower primates... Equally inferior—& perhaps even more so—is the Australian black stock, which differs widely from the real negro... In dealing with these two black races, there is only one sound attitude for any other race (be it white, Indian, Malay, Polynesian, or Mongolian) to take—& that is to prevent admixture as completely & determinedly as it can be prevented, through the establishment of a colour-line & the rigid forcing of all mixed offspring below that line. I am in accord with the most vehement & vociferous Alabaman or Mississippian on that point … Other racial questions are wholly different in nature—involving wide variations unconnected with superiority or inferiority. Only an ignorant dolt would attempt to call a Chinese gentleman—heir to one of the greatest artistic & philosophic traditions in the world—an "inferior" of any sort... & yet there are potent reasons, based on wide physical, mental, & cultural differences, why great numbers of the Chinese ought not to mix into the Caucasian fabric, or vice versa. It is not that one race is any better than any other, but that their whole respective heritages are so antipodal as to make harmonious adjustment impossible. Members of one race can fit into another only through the complete eradication of their own background-influences—& even then the adjustment will always remain uneasy & imperfect if the newcomer's physical aspect froms a constant reminder of his outside origin. Therefore it is wise to discourage all mixtures of sharply differentiated races—though the color-line does not need to be drawn as strictly as in the case of the negro, since we know that a dash or two of Mongolian or Indian or Hindoo or some such blood will not actually injure a white stock biologically.... As a matter of fact, most of the psychological race-differences which strike us so prominently are cultural rather than biological. If one could take a Japanese infant, alter his features to the Anglo-Saxon type through plastic surgery, & place him with an American family in Boston for rearing—without telling him that he is not an American—the chances are that in 20 years the result would be a typical American youth with very few instincts to distinguish him from his pure Nordic college-mates. The same is true of other superior alien races including the Jew—although the Nazis persist in acting on a false biological conception. If they were wise in their campaign to get rid of Jewish cultural influences (& a great deal can be said for such a campaign, when the dominance of the Aryan tradition is threatened as in Germany & New York City), they would not emphasize the separatism of the Jew but would strive to make him give up his separate culture & lose himself in the German people. It wouldn't hurt Germany—or alter its essential physical type—to take in all the Jews it now has.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

However, that wouldn't work in Poland or New York City, where the Jews are of an inferior strain, & so numerous that they would essentially modify the physical type.
Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (22 November 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 77
Non-Fiction, Letters

“As for your artificial conception of "splendid & traditional ways of life"—I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealisation of something which never truly existed; a conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments, & situations, & which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they professed to depict... In some ways the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency, & squalor which we would find insupportable... Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods & use them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stern actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me—only I'm fully aware of it. Except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow, & artificial. What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream-world which I invented at the age of four from picture books & the Georgian hill streets of Old Providence.... There is something artificial & hollow & unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism—this being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy-going eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pulmotor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation; bequeathing such elements as really are sound, losing such as have lost value, & adding any which new conditions may make necessary.... In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such, but I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate, & disproportionate; for these qualities mean ugliness & weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life & feelings of the past which they claim to represent... If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different; but almost invariably the neotraditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experience with life... For any person today to fancy he can truly enter into the life & feeling of another period is really nothing but a confession of ignorance of the depth & nature of life in its full sense. This is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century, though my objective judgment knows better, & realises the vast difference from the real thing. The one redeeming thing about my ignorance of life & remoteness from reality is that I am fully conscious of it, hence (in the last few years) make allowances for it, & do not pretend to an impossible ability to enter into the actual feelings of this or any other age. The emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, &c. &c. so different from our own, that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them, or enter warmly & subjectively into all phases of their aesthetic expression.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 307
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

“When I say that I can write nothing but weird fiction, I am not trying to exalt that medium but am merely confessing my own weakness. The reason I can't write other kinds is not that I don't value & respect them, but merely that my slender set of endowments does not enable me to extract a compellingly acute personal sense of interest & drama from the natural phenomena of life. I know that these natural phenomena are more important & significant than the special & tenuous moods which so absorb me, & that an art based on them is greater than any which fantasy could evoke—but I'm simply not big enough to react to them in the sensitive way necessary for artistic response & literary use. God in heaven! I'd certainly be glad enough to be a Shakespeare or Balzac or Turgeniev if I could!... I respect realism more than any other form of art—but must reluctantly concede that, through my own limitations, it does not form a medium which I can adequately use.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to E. Hoffman Price (29 September 1933), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

“The odour rising from the newly opened depths was intolerable, and at length the quick-eared Hawkins thought he heard a nasty, slopping sound down there. Everyone listened, and everyone was listening still when It lumbered slobberingly into sight and gropingly squeezed Its gelatinous green immensity through the black doorway into the tainted outside air of that poison city of madness.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.”

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H.P. Lovecraft livre Supernatural Horror in Literature

"Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927)
Non-Fiction

“You & James Ferdinand simply can't learn to distinguish betwixt intellectual opinion & irrelevant instinctive emotion... For instance, he has the idea that I place an exaggerated intellectual valuation on the 18th century merely because my chance emotions have given me a strong but irrational subjective sense of belonging to it. I've told that bird dozens of times that I have no especial intellectual brief for Georgian days... He can't understand my ability to class as merely one period among others an age to which random early impressions have so closely bound my emotions & sense of identity... the point is that my own personal mess of subjective emotions has nothing whatever to do with my intellectual opinions. I have freely declared myself at all times (like everybody else in his respective way) a mere product of my background, & do not consider the values of that background as applicable to outsiders. The only way for the individual to achieve any contentment or harmonic relationship to a pattern is to adhere to the background naturally his; & that is what I am doing. Others I urge to adhere to their own respective backgrounds & traditions, however remote from mine these may be. When I venture now & then to suggest values of a more general kind, I approach the problem in an entirely different way—speaking not as Old Theobald of His Majesty's Rhode-Island Colony, but as the cosmic & impersonal Ec'h-Pi-El, denizen of the invisible world 'Ui-ulh in the second zone of curved space outside angled space... If there is any approach to an absolute value in the cosmos—or at least on this planet—then this is it. Sincerity—is-or-isn't-ness—technical perfection—harmony—coherence—consistency—symmetry—all these things are obviously aspects of one single property of space, energy, & general mathematical harmonics whose universality gives it the deepest possible significance. I have thought this all my life, & that is why to me one Newton or Einstein, one M. Atilius Regulus, M. Porcius Cato, or P. Cornelius Scipio, seems to me in certain ways worth a full dozen of your prattling little Keatses & Baudelaires.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 312
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

“Johansen, thank God, did not know quite all, even though he saw the city and the Thing, but I shall never sleep calmly again when I think of the horrors that lurk ceaselessly behind life in time and in space, and of those unhallowed blasphemies from elder stars which dream beneath the sea, known and favoured by a nightmare cult ready and eager to loose them upon the world whenever another earthquake shall heave their monstrous stone city again to the sun and air.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“I took opium but once — in the year of the plague, when doctors sought to deaden the agonies they could not cure. There was an overdose — my physician was worn out with horror and exertion — and I travelled very far indeed. In the end I returned and lived, but my nights are filled with strange memories, nor have I ever permitted a doctor to give me opium again.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)

“We know today that nothing will restore the pre-machine condition of reasonably universal employment save an artificial allocation of working hours involving the use of more men than formerly to perform a given task.... The primary function of society, in spite of all the sophistries spurred of selfishness, is to give men better conditions than they could get without it; and the basic need today is jobs for all—not for "property" for a few of the luck and the acquisitive.... In view of the urgent need for change, there is something almost obscene in the chatter of the selfish about various psychological evils allegedly inherent in a New Deal promising decent economic security and humane leisure for all instead of for a few.... What is worth answering is the kindred outcry about "regimentation", "collective slavery", "violation of Anglo-Saxon freedom", "destruction of the right of the individual to make his own way" and so on; with liberal references to Stalin, Hitler, Mustapha Kemal, and other extremist dictators who have sought to control men's personal, intellectual, and artistic lives, and traditional habits and folkways, as well as their economic fortunes. Naturally the Anglo-Saxon balks at any programme calculated to limit his freedom as a man and a thinker or to disturb his inherited perspectives and daily customs—and need we say that no plan ever proposed in an Anglo-Saxon country would conceivably seek to limit such freedom or disturb such perspectives and customs? Here we have a deliberate smoke-screen—conscious and malicious confusion of terms. A decent planned society would indeed vary to some extent the existing regulations (for there are such) governing commercial and economic life. Yet who save a self-confessed Philistine or Marxist (the plutocrat can cite "Das Kapital" for his purpose!) would claim that the details and conditions of our merely economic activities form more than a trivial fraction of our whole lives and personalities? That which is essential and distinctive about a man is not the routine of material struggle he follows in his office; but the civilised way he lives, outside his office, the life whose maintenance is the object of his struggle. So long as his office work gains him a decently abundant and undisputedly free life, it matters little what that work is—what the ownership of the enterprise, and what and how distributed its profits, if profits there be. We have seen that no system proposes to deny skill and diligence an adequate remuneration. What more may skill and diligence legitimately ask? Nor is any lessening in the pride of achievement contemplated. Man will thrill just as much at the overcoming of vast obstacles, and the construction of great works, whether his deeds be performed for service or for profit. As it is, the greatest human achievements have never been for profit. Would Keats or Newton or Lucretius or Einstein or Santayana flourish less under a rationally planned society? Any intimation that a man's life is wholly his industrial life, and that a planned economic order means a suppression of his personality, is really both a piece of crass ignorance and an insult to human nature. Incidentally, it is curious that no one has yet pointed to the drastically regulated economic life of the early Mass. Bay colony as something "American!"”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Unpublished (and probably unsent) letter to the Providence Journal (13 April 1934), quoted in Collected Essays, Volume 5: Philosophy, edited by J. T. Joshi, pp. 115-116
Non-Fiction, Letters

“I have never believed that the securing of material resources ought to form the central interest of human life—but have instead maintained that personality is an independent flowering of the intellect and emotions wholly apart from the struggle for existence. Formerly I accepted the archaic dictum that only a few can be relieved of the engulfing waste of the material struggle in its bitterest form—a dictum which is, of course, true in an agricultural age having scanty resources. Therefore I adopted an aristocratic attitude; regretfully arguing that life, in any degree of fulness, is only for the fortunate few whose ancestors' prowess has given them economic security and leisure. But I did not take the bourgeois position of praising struggle for its own sake. While recognising certain worthy qualities brought out by it, I was too much impressed by its stultifying attributes to regard it as other than a necessary evil. In my opinion, only the leisured aristocrat really had a chance at adequate life—nor did I despise him because he was not forced to struggle. Instead, I was sorry that so few could share his good fortune. Too much human energy was wasted in the mere scramble for food and shelter. The condition was tolerable only because inevitable in yesterday's world of scanty resources. Millions of men must go to waste in order that a few might really live. Still—if those few were not upheld, no high culture would ever be built up. I never had any use for the American pioneer's worship of work and self-reliance for their own sakes. These things are necessary in their place, but not ends in themselves—and any attempt to make them ends in themselves is essentially uncivilised. Thus I have no fundamental meeting-ground with the rugged Yankee individualist. I represent rather the mood of the agrarian feudalism which preceded the pioneering and capitalistic phases. My ideal of life is nothing material or quantitative, but simply the security and leisure necessary for the maximum flowering of the human spirit.... Well—so much for the past. Now we live in an age of easy abundance which makes possible the fulfilment of all moderate human wants through a relatively slight amount of labour. What shall be the result? Shall we still make resources prohibitively hard to get when there is really a plethora of them? Shall we allow antique notions of allocation—"property," etc.—to interfere with the rational distribution of this abundant stock of resources among all those who require them? Shall we value hardship and anxiety and uncertainty so fatuously as to impose these evils artificially on people who do not need to bear them, through the perpetuation of a set of now irrelevant and inapplicable rules of allocation? What reasonable objection is there to an intelligent centralised control of resources whose primary object shall be the elimination of want in every quarter—a thing possible without removing comfortable living from any one now enjoying it? To call the allocation of resources something "uncontrollable" by man—and in an age when virtually all natural forces are harnessed and utilised—is simply infantile. It is simply that those who now have the lion's share don't want any fresh or rational allocation. It is needless to say that no sober thinker envisages a workless equalitarian paradise. Much work remains, and human capacities differ. High-grade service must still receive greater rewards than low-grade service. But amidst the present abundance of goods and minimisation of possible work, there must be a fair and all-inclusive allocation of the chances to perform work and secure rewards. When society can't give a man work, it must keep him comfortable without it; but it must give him work if it can, and must compel him to perform it when it is needed. This does not involve interference with personal life and habits (contrary to what some reactionaries say), nor is the absence of insecurity anything to deplore.... But of course the real need of change comes not from the mere fact of abundant resources, but from the growth of conditions making it impossible for millions to have any chance of getting any resources under the present outworn set of artificial rules. This development is no myth. Machines had displaced 900,000 men in the U. S. before the crash of '29, and no conceivable regime of "prosperity" (where by a few people will have abundant and flexible resources and successfully exchange them among one another) will ever make it possible to avoid the permanent presence of millions of unemployed, so long as old-fashioned laissez-faire capitalism is adhered to.... And so I have readjusted my ideas. … I have gone almost reluctantly—step by step, as pressed by facts too insistent to deny—and am still quite as remote from Belknap's naive Marxism as I am from the equally naive Republican orthodoxy I have left behind. I am as set as ever against any cultural upheaval—and believe that nothing of the kind is necessary in order to achieve a new and feasible economic equilibrium. The best of culture has always been non-economic.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Hitherto it has grown out of the secure, non-struggling life of the aristocrat. In future it may be expected to grow out of the secure and not-so-struggling life of whatever citizens are personally able to develop it. There need be no attempt to drag culture down to the level of crude minds. That, indeed, would be something to fight tooth and nail! With economic opportunities artificially regulated, we may well let other interests follow a natural course. Inherent differences in people and in tastes will create different social-cultural classes as in the past—although the relation of these classes to the holding of material resources will be less fixed than in the capitalistic age now closing. All this, of course, is directly contrary to Belknap's rampant Stalinism—but I'm telling you I'm no bolshevik! I am for the preservation of all values worth preserving—and for the maintenance of complete cultural continuity with the Western-European mainstream. Don't fancy that the dethronement of certain purely economic concepts means an abrupt break in that stream. Rather does it mean a return to art impulses typically aristocratic (that is, disinterested, leisurely, non-ulterior) rather than bourgeois.
Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (28 October 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 60-64
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Never could I tell, try as I might, what it actually was that I saw; nor could the still face tell, for although it must have seen more than I did, it will never speak again. But always I shall guard against the mocking and insatiate Hypnos, lord of sleep, against the night sky, and against the mad ambitions of knowledge and philosophy.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, Hypnos (1922)

“One can't write a weird story of real power without perfect psychological detachment from the human scene, and a magic prism of imagination which suffuses them and style alike with that grotesquerie and disquieting distortion characteristic of morbid vision. Only a cynic can create horror—for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving daemonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird printed in Weird Tales 3, no. 3 (March 1924), pp. 89-92. Quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 122
Non-Fiction, Letters

“The statuette, idol, fetish, or whatever it was, had been captured some months before in the wooded swamps south of New Orleans during a raid on a supposed voodoo meeting; and so singular and hideous were the rites connected with it, that the police could not but realise that they had stumbled on a dark cult totally unknown to them, and infinitely more diabolic than even the blackest of the African voodoo circles. Of its origin, apart from the erratic and unbelievable tales extorted from the captured members, absolutely nothing was to be discovered; hence the anxiety of the police for any antiquarian lore which might help them to place the frightful symbol, and through it track down the cult to its fountain-head.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“They say that that haunting memory-face is modeled from my own, as it was at twenty-five; but upon the marble base is carven a single name in the letters of Attica — HYPNOS.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, Hypnos (1922)

“Oh, yes … I'm really frightfully human and love all mankind, and all that sort of thing. Mankind is truly amusing, when kept at the proper distance. And common men, if well-behaved, are really quite useful. One is a cynick only when one thinks. At such times the herd seems a bit disgusting because each member of it is always trying to hurt somebody else, or gloating because somebody else is hurt. Inflicting pain seems to be the chief sport of persons whose tastes and interests run to ordinary events and direct pleasures and rewards of life—the animalistic or (if one may use a term so polluted with homoletick associations) worldly people of our absurd civilisation. ……. I may be human, all right, but not quite human enough to be glad at the misfortune of anybody. I am rather sorry (not outwardly but genuinely so) when disaster befalls a person—sorry because it gives the herd so much pleasure. … The natural hatefulness and loathsomeness of the human beast may be overcome only in a few specimens of fine heredity and breeding, by a transference of interests to abstract spheres and a consequent sublimation of the universal sadistic fury. All that is good in man is artificial; and even that good is very slight and unstable, since nine out of ten non-primitive people proceed at once to capitalise their asceticism and vent their sadism by a Victorian brutality and scorn towards all those who do not emulate their pose. Puritans are probably more contemptible than primitive beasts, though neither class deserves much respect.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to James F. Morton (8 March 1923), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 211-212
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Personally, I feel more irritated by a challenge to an accepted scientific theory than I do by an act of so-called "evil" or "injustice" among mankind; although I never allow my irritation to hamper my acceptance of the new theory as soon as positive evidence warrants it. Thus I have reluctantly exchanged the old nebular for the planetesimal hypothesis, and am beginning to accept the main points of relativity despite a profound intellectual distaste. What is, is—and our emotions regarding the cosmos and its phenomena are of no significance whatever, being wholly subjective matters dependent on individual accidents of neural and glandular physiology and of experience and environment.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Woodburn Harris (25 February-1 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 287-288
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Your wonderment 'what I have against religion' reminds me of your recent Vagrant essay… To my mind, that essay misses one point altogether. Your "agnostic" has neglected to mention the very crux of all agnosticism—namely that the Judaeo-Christian mythology is NOT TRUE. I can see that in your philosophy truth per se has so small a place, that you can scarcely realise what it is that Galpin and I are insisting upon. In your mind, MAN is the centre of everything, and his exact conformation to certain regulations of conduct HOWEVER EFFECTED, the only problem in the universe. Your world (if you will pardon my saying so) is contracted. All the mental vigour and erudition of the ages fail to disturb your complacent endorsement of empirical doctrines and purely pragmatical notions, because you voluntarily limit your horizon—excluding certain facts, and certain undeniable mental tendencies of mankind. In your eyes, man is torn between only two influences; the degrading instincts of the savage, and the temperate impulses of the philanthropist. To you, men have but two types of emotion—lovers of the self and lovers of the race…. You are forgetting a human impulse which, despite its restriction to a relatively small number of men, has all through history proved itself as real and as vital as hunger—as potent as thirst or greed. I need not say that I refer to that simplest yet most exalted attribute of our species—the acute, persistent, unquenchable craving TO KNOW. Do you realise that to many men it makes a vast and profound difference whether or not the things about them are as they appear?… If TRUTH amounts to nothing, then we must regard the phantasma of our slumbers just as seriously as the events of our daily lives…. I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake—whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. I admit that I am very much interested in the relation I bear to the things about me—the time relation, the space relation, and the causative relation. I desire to know approximately what my life is in terms of history—human, terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; what my magnitude may be in terms of extension,—terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; and above all, what may be my manner of linkage to the general system—in what way, through what agency, and to what extent, the obvious guiding forces of creation act upon me and govern my existence. And if there be any less obvious forces, I desire to know them and their relation to me as well.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Maurice W. Moe (15 May 1918), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 60
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Inconceivable events and conditions form a class apart from all other story elements, and cannot be made convincing by any mere process of casual narration. They have the handicap of incredibility to overcome; and this can be accomplished only through a careful realism in every other phase of the story, plus a gradual atmospheric or emotional build-up of the utmost subtlety. The emphasis, too, must be kept right—hovering always over the wonder of the central abnormality itself. It must be remembered that any violation of what we know as natural law is in itself a far more tremendous thing than any other event or feeling which could possibly affect a human being. Therefore in a story dealing with such a thing we cannot expect to create any sense of life or illusion of reality if we treat the wonder casually and have the characters moving about under ordinary motivations. The characters, though they must be natural, should be subordinated to the central marvel around which they are grouped. The true "hero" of a marvel tale is not any human being, but simply a set of phenomena. Over and above everything else should tower the stark, outrageous monstrousness of the one chosen departure from Nature. The characters should react to it as real people would react to such a thing if it were suddenly to confront them in daily life; displaying the almost soul-shattering amazement which anyone would naturally display instead of the mild, tame, quickly-passed-over emotions prescribed by cheap popular convention. Even when the wonder is one to which the characters are assumed to be used, the sense of awe, marvel, and strangeness which the reader would feel in the presence of such a thing must somehow be suggested by the author.... Atmosphere, not action, is the thing to cultivate in the wonder story. We cannot put stress on the bare events, since the unnatural extravagance of these events makes them sound hollow and absurd when thrown into too high relief. Such events, even when theoretically possible or conceivable in the future, have no counterpart or basis in existing life and human experience, hence can never form the groundwork of an adult tale. All that a marvel story can ever be, in a serious way, is a vivid picture of a certain type of human mood. The moment it tries to be anything else it becomes cheap, puerile, and unconvincing. Therefore a fantastic author should see that his prime emphasis goes into subtle suggestion—the imperceptible hints and touches of selective and associative detail which express shadings of moods and build up a vague illusion of the strange reality of the unreal—instead of into bald catalogues of incredible happenings which can have no substance or meaning apart from a sustaining cloud of colour and mood-symbolism. A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis toward something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural laws.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

"Some Notes on Interplanetary Fiction", Californian 3, No. 3 (Winter 1935): 39-42. Published in Collected Essays, Volume 2: Literary Criticism edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 178
Non-Fiction