Frasi di Howard Phillips Lovecraft (233 frasi, pagina 6)

Letter to August Derleth (16 May 1931), responding to Derleth's suggestion that he call the interconnected mythology of his stories (what would later be known as the Cthulhu Mythos) "The Mythology of Hastur", quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 505
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth

“As for the general idea of what one would do if certain of death in an hour—I fancy most persons in normal health tend to sentimentalise and romanticise a bit about it. For my part—as a realist beyond the age of theatricalism and naive beliefs—I feel quite certain that my own known last hour would be spent quite prosaically in writing instructions for the disposition of certain books, manuscripts, heirlooms, and other possessions. Such a task would—in view of the mental stress—take at least an hour—and it would be the most useful thing I could do before dropping off into oblivion. If I did finish ahead of time, I'd probably spend the residual minutes getting a last look at something closely associated with my earliest memories—a picture, a library table, an 1895 Farmer's Almanack, a small music-box I used to play with at 2 ½, or some kindred symbol—completing a psychological circle in a spirit half of humour and half of whimsical sentimentality. Then—nothingness, as before Aug. 20, 1890.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to a round-robin letter-writing group called "the Coryciani" (14 July 1936), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 339
Non-Fiction, Letters

“No anthropologist of standing insists on the uniformly advanced evolution of the Nordic as compared with that of other Caucasian and Mongolian races. As a matter of fact, it is freely conceded that the Mediterranean race turns out a higher percentage of the aesthetically sensitive and that the Semitic groups excel in sharp, precise intellectation. It may be, too, that the Mongolian excels in aesthetick capacity and normality of philosophical adjustment. What, then, is the secret of pro-Nordicism among those who hold these views? Simply this—that ours is a Nordic culture, and that the roots of that culture are so inextricably tangled in the national standards, perspectives, traditions, memories, instincts, peculiarities, and physical aspects of the Nordic stream that no other influences are fitted to mingle in our fabric. We don't despise the French in France or Quebec, but we don't want them grabbing our territory and creating foreign islands like Woonsocket and Fall River. The fact of this uniqueness of every separate culture-stream—this dependence of instinctive likes and dislikes, natural methods, unconscious appraisals, etc., etc., on the physical and historical attributes of a single race—is to obvious to be ignored except by empty theorists.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to James F. Morton (18 January 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 587
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

“All I say is that I think it is damned unlikely that anything like a central cosmic will, a spirit world, or an eternal survival of personality exist. They are the most preposterous and unjustified of all the guesses which can be made about the universe, and I am not enough of a hair-splitter to pretend that I don't regard them as arrant and negligible moonshine. In theory I am an agnostic, but pending the appearance of radical evidence I must be classed, practically and provisionally, as an atheist.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Robert E. Howard (16 August 1932), in Selected Letters 1932-1934 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 57
Non-Fiction, Letters

“The writing accompanying this oddity was, aside from a stack of press cuttings, in Professor Angell's most recent hand; and made no pretense to literary style. What seemed to be the main document was headed "CTHULHU CULT" in characters painstakingly printed to avoid the erroneous reading of a word so unheard-of.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“Everything I loved had been dead for two centuries—or, as in the case of Graeco-Roman classicism, for two milenniums. I am never a part of anything around me—in everything I am an outsider. Should I find it possible to crawl backward through the Halls of Time to that age which is nearest my own fancy, I should doubtless be bawled out of the coffee-houses for heresy in religion, or else lampooned by John Dennis till I found refuge in the deep, silent Thames, that covers many another unfortunate. Yes, I seem to be a decided pessimist!—But pray do not think, gentlemen, that I am utterly forlorn and misanthropick creature. … Despite my solitary life, I have found infinite joy in books and writing, and am by far too much interested in the affairs of the world to quit the scene before Nature shall claim me. Though not a participant in the Business of life; I am, like the character of Addison and Steele, an impartial (or more or less impartial) Spectator, who finds not a little recreation in watching the antics of those strange and puny puppets called men. A sense of humour has helped me to endure existence; in fact, when all else fails, I never fail to extract a sarcastic smile from the contemplation of my own empty and egotistical career!”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to "The Keicomolo"—Kleiner, Cole, and Moe (October 1916), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 27
Non-Fiction, Letters

“It delights me even more, though, to hear that my nameless cosmic monsters have an air of originality about them! Shapeless, unheard-of creatures are not original with me; for although Poe did not use them, they figure quite widely in minor horror-writing since his time. Usually they tend to be exaggerations of certain known life-forms such as insects, poisonous plants, protozoa, & the like, although a few writers break away wholly from terrestrial analogy & depict things as abstractly cosmic as luminous protoplasmic globes. If I have gone beyond these, it is only subtly & atmospherically—in details, & in occasional imputations of geometrical, biological, & physico-chemical properties definitely outside the realm of matter as understood by us. Most of my monsters fail altogether to satisfy my sense of the cosmic—the abnormally chromatic entity in The Colour Out of Space being the only one of the lot which I take any pride in.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (8 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 316
Non-Fiction, Letters

“As you are aware, I have never been able to soothe myself with the sugary delusions of religion; for these things stand convicted of the utmost absurdity in light of modern scientific knowledge. With Nietzsche, I have been forced to confess that mankind as a whole has no goal or purpose whatsoever, but is a mere superfluous speck in the unfathomable vortices of infinity and eternity. Accordingly, I have hardly been able to experience anything which one could call real happiness; or to take as vital an interest in human affairs as can one who still retains the hallucination of a "great purpose" in the general plan of terrestrial life. … However, I have never permitted these circumstances to react upon my daily life; for it is obvious that although I have "nothing to live for", I certainly have just as much as any other of the insignificant bacteria called human beings. I have thus been content to observe the phenomena about me with something like objective interest, and to feel a certain tranquillity which comes from perfect acceptance of my place as an inconsequential atom. In ceasing to care about most things, I have likewise ceased to suffer in many ways. There is a real restfulness in the scientific conviction that nothing matters very much; that the only legitimate aim of humanity is to minimise acute suffering for the majority, and to derive whatever satisfaction is derivable from the exercise of the mind in the pursuit of truth.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner (14 September 1919), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 86-87
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Something terrible came to the hills and valleys on that meteor, and something terrible — though I know not in what proportion — still remains.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Colour Out of Space (1927)

“In my actual imaginative contact with life, I am vastly more responsive to beauty than to horror—indeed, I never experience real cosmic horror except in infrequent nightmares. However, when I come to record my various imaginative experiences, I generally find that only the horror items have any uniqueness or originality. Others have seen the same beautiful things that I have seen, & have sung them more nobly. Dunsany, indeed, has said exquisitely almost everything I could possibly wish to say; so that when I indulge in sheer phantasy I can do no more than imitate him. Thus horror alone is left as my peculiar kingdom, & in it I must hold my lowly reproduction of a Plutonian court.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Elizabeth Toldridge (8 March 1929), in Selected Letters II, 1925-1929 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 316-317
Non-Fiction, Letters

“To shake off the maddening and wearying limitations of time and space and natural law—to be linked with the vast outside—to come close to the nighted and abysmal secrets of the infinite and the ultimate—surely such a thing was worth the risk of one’s life, soul, and sanity!”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Whisperer in Darkness (1931)

“Instead of the poems I had hoped for, there came only a shuddering blackness and ineffable loneliness; and I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before — the unwhisperable secret of secrets — The fact that this city of stone and stridor is not a sentient perpetuation of Old New York as London is of Old London and Paris of Old Paris, but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life.”

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H.P. Lovecraft libro He

"He" - Written 11 August 1925; first published in Weird Tales, Vol. 8, No. 3 (September 1926)
Fiction

“The very sun of heaven seemed distorted when viewed through the polarising miasma welling out from this sea-soaked perversion, and twisted menace and suspense lurked leeringly in those crazily elusive angles of carven rock where a second glance shewed concavity after the first shewed convexity.
Something very like fright had come over all the explorers before anything more definite than rock and ooze and weed was seen.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.”

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H.P. Lovecraft libro The Tomb

"The Tomb" (1917)
Fiction

“I am Providence, and Providence is myself—together, indissolubly as one, we stand thro' the ages; a fixt monument set aeternally in the shadow of Durfee's ice-clad peak!”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to James F. Morton (16 May 1926), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 192
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

“There be those who say that things and places have souls, and there be those who say they have not; I dare not say, myself, but I will tell of The Street.”

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H.P. Lovecraft libro The Street

"The Street" - first published in The Wolverine, No. 8 (December 1920)
Fiction

“What I now heard so graphically at first-hand, though it was really no more than a detailed confirmation of what my uncle had written, excited me afresh; for I felt sure that I was on the track of a very real, very secret, and very ancient religion whose discovery would make me an anthropologist of note. My attitude was still one of absolute materialism, as l wish it still were, and I discounted with almost inexplicable perversity the coincidence of the dream notes and odd cuttings collected by Professor Angell.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. 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.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

At the Root (1918)
Non-Fiction

“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 makes no difference how well they mean or how cordial they are—they simply get on my nerves unless they chance to represent a peculiarly similar combination of tastes, experiences, and heritages; as, for instance, Belknap chances to do... Therefore it may be taken as axiomatic that the people of a place matter absolutely nothing to me except as components of the general landscape and scenery. Let me have normal American faces in the streets to give the aspect of home and a white man's country, and I ask no more of featherless bipeds. My life lies not among people but among scenes—my local affections are not personal, but topographical and architectural. No one in Providence—family aside—has any especial bond of interest with me, but for that matter no one in Cambridge or anywhere else has, either. The question is that of which roofs and chimneys and doorways and trees and street vistas I love the best; which hills and woods, which roads and meadows, which farmhouses and views of distant white steeples in green valleys. I am always an outsider—to all scenes and all people—but outsiders have their sentimental preferences in visual environment. I will be dogmatic only to the extent of saying that it is New England I must have—in some form or other. Providence is part of me—I am Providence—but as I review the new impressions which have impinged upon me since birth, I think the greatest single emotion—and the most permanent one as concerns consequences to my inner life and imagination—I have ever experienced was my first sight of Marblehead in the golden glamour of late afternoon under the snow on December 17, 1922. That thrill has lasted as nothing else has—a visible climax and symbol of the lifelong mysterious tie which binds my soul to ancient things and ancient places.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Lillian D. Clark (29 March 1926), quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 186
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Slowly but inexorably crawling upon my consciousness and rising above every other impression, came a dizzying fear of the unknown; a fear all the greater because I could not analyse it, and seeming to concern a stealthily approaching menace; not death, but some nameless, unheard-of thing inexpressibly more ghastly and abhorrent.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)

“I am probably the least sensuous of all living beings; being almost exclusively visual and quasi-abstract in imagination, and tending to view and enjoy all things as a passive, detached, and sometimes remote spectator. Those arts which appeal most to the ideational imagination—the sense of drama, pageantry, historic flux, collective organisation, or escape from the natural limitations of time, space, and natural law—are undoubtedly those which appeal chiefly to me. Even my strong love of architectural and decorative beauty is probably largely dependent upon the historical bearings of the forms and motifs in which I delight. I am not wholly insensible to abstract form, but seem to relish the associative element in art more instantly and acutely than the lyrical or mathematical element... I don't really revel in anything unless it reminds me of something else either real or visionary—unless it opens up visual avenues of linked pseudo-recollections leading to sensations of ego-expansion and liberation... usually bringing in the element of time, somehow based on the past, and harbouring hints of an elusive, intangible kind of adventurous expectancy.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Virgil Finlay (25 September 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 310
Non-Fiction, Letters

“No recognised school of sculpture had animated this terrible object, yet centuries and even thousands of years seemed recorded in its dim and greenish surface of unplaceable stone.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“Nothing must disturb my undiluted Englishry — God Save The King! I am naturally a Nordic — a chalk-white, bulky Teuton of the Scandinavian or North-German forests — a Vikinga berserk killer — a predatory rover of Hengist and Horsa — a conqueror of Celts and mongrels and founders of Empires — a son of the thunders and the arctic winds, and brother to the frosts and the auroras — a drinker of foemen's blood from new picked skulls — a friend of the mountain buzzards and feeder of seacoast vultures — a blond beast of eternal snows and frozen oceans — a prayer to Odin and Thor and Woden and Alfadur, the raucous shouter of Niffelheim — a comrade of the wolves, and rider of nightmares — aye — I speak truly — for was I not born with yellow hair and blue eyes.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (3 May 1923), published in Selected Letters Vol. I (1965), p. 227
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

“Even the dry tips of the lingering hedge-mustard, grey and blighted, and the fringe on the roof of the standing democrat-wagon were unstirred. And yet amid that tense godless calm the high bare boughs of all the trees in the yard were moving….”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Colour Out of Space (1927)

“Now the trickiest catch in the negro problem is the fact that it is really twofold. The black is vastly inferior. There can be no question of this among contemporary and unsentimental biologists—eminent Europeans for whom the prejudice-problem does not exist. But, it is also a fact that there would be a very grave and very legitimate problem even if the negro were the white man's equal. For the simple fact is, that two widely dissimilar races, whether equal or not, cannot peaceably coexist in the same territory until they are either uniformly mongrelised or cast in folkways of permanent and traditional personal aloofness. No normal being feels at ease amidst a population having vast elements radically different from himself in physical aspect and emotional responses. A normal Yankee feels like a fish out of water in a crowd of cultivated Japanese, even though they may be his mental and aesthetic superiors; and the normal Jap feels the same way in a crowd of Yankees. This, of course, implies permanent association. We can all visit exotic scenes and like it—and when we are young and unsophisticated we usually think we might continue to like it as a regular thing. But as years pass, the need of old things and usual influences—home faces and home voices—grows stronger and stronger; and we come to see that mongrelism won't work. We require the environing influence of a set of ways and physical types like our own, and will sacrifice anything to get them. Nothing means anything, in the end, except with reference to that continuous immediate fabric of appearances and experiences of which one was originally part; and if we find ourselves ingulphed by alien and clashing influences, we instinctively fight against them in pursuit of the dominant freeman's average quota of legitimate contentment.... All that any living man normally wants—and all that any man worth calling such will stand for—is as stable and pure a perpetuation as possible of the set of forms and appearances to which his value-perceptions are, from the circumstances of moulding, instinctively attuned. That is all there is to life—the preservation of a framework which will render the experience of the individual apparently relevant and significant, and therefore reasonably satisfying. Here we have the normal phenomenon of race-prejudice in a nutshell—the legitimate fight of every virile personality to live in a world where life shall seem to mean something.... Just how the black and his tan penumbra can ultimately be adjusted to the American fabric, yet remains to be seen. It is possible that the economic dictatorship of the future can work out a diplomatic plan of separate allocation whereby the blacks may follow a self-contained life of their own, avoiding the keenest hardships of inferiority through a reduced number of points of contact with the whites... No one wishes them any intrinsic harm, and all would rejoice if a way were found to ameliorate such difficulties as they have without imperilling the structure of the dominant fabric. It is a fact, however, that sentimentalists exaggerate the woes of the average negro. Millions of them would be perfectly content with servile status if good physical treatment and amusement could be assured them, and they may yet form a well-managed agricultural peasantry. The real problem is the quadroon and octoroon—and still lighter shades. Theirs is a sorry tragedy, but they will have to find a special place. What we can do is to discourage the increase of their numbers by placing the highest possible penalties on miscegenation, and arousing as much public sentiment as possible against lax customs and attitudes—especially in the inland South—at present favouring the melancholy and disgusting phenomenon. All told, I think the modern American is pretty well on his guard, at last, against racial and cultural mongrelism. There will be much deterioration, but the Nordic has a fighting chance of coming out on top in the end.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to James F. Morton (January 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 253
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

“Our modern worship of empty ideals is ludicrous. What does the condition of the rabble matter? All we need do is to keep it as quiet as we can. What is more important, is to perpetuate those things of beauty which are of real value because involving actual sense-impressions rather than vapid theories. "Equality" is a joke — but a great abbey or cathedral, covered with moss, is a poignant reality. If it is for us to safeguard and preserve the conditions which produce great abbeys, and palaces, and picturesque walled town, and vivid sky-lines of steeples and domes, and luxurious tapestries, and fascinating books, paintings and statuary, and colossal organs and noble music, and dramatic deeds on embattled fields — these are all there is of life: take them away and we have nothing which a man of taste or spirit would care to live for. Take them away and our poets have nothing to sing — our dreamers have nothing to dream about. The blood of a million men is well shed in producing one glorious legend which thrills posterity and it is not at all important why it was shed.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to James F. Morton (10 February 1923), published in Selected Letters Vol. I (1965), p. 208
Non-Fiction, Letters, to James Ferdinand Morton, Jr.

“I do not regard the rise of woman as a bad sign. Rather do I fancy that her traditional subordination was itself an artificial and undesirable condition based on Oriental influences. Our virile Teutonic ancestors did not think their wives unworthy to follow them into battle, or scorn to dream of winged Valkyries bearing them to Valhalla. The feminine mind does not cover the same territory as the masculine, but is probably little if any inferior in total quality. To expect it to remain perpetually in the background in a realistic state of society is futile—despite the most feverish efforts of Nazis and Fascisti. However—it will be some time before women are sufficiently freed from past influences to form an active factor in national life. By the time they do gain influence, they will have lost many of the emotional characteristics which now impair their powers of judgment. Many qualities commonly regarded as innate—in races, classes, and sexes alike—are in reality results of habitual and imperceptible conditioning.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (28 October 1934), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 64
Non-Fiction, Letters