Cosmic Horror Quotes

Maybe this world is another planet's hell.

I think it is beyond doubt that H. P. Lovecraft has yet to be surpassed as the twentieth century's greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale.

Now, after 18 years, not a sign of Lovecraft in my work.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

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.

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.

The most terrifying things in the universe came from human minds.

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.

Lovecraft opened the way for me, as he had done for others before me

I tend to look way back for my inspiration: H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allen Poe.

The one test of the really weird (story) is simply this--whether or not there be excited in the reader a profound sense of dread, and of contact with unknown spheres and powers; a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe's utmost rim.

'Dark Gods,' T. E. D. Klein's book of four novellas, felt like a godsend - even if it came from a deformed god, one that lurked beneath our sidewalks.

Far, far below the deepest delvings of the dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things.

How many fears came between us? Earthquakes, diseases, wars where hell rained smoldering pus from skies made of winged death. Horror tore this world asunder. While inside the bleeding smoke and beyond the shredded weeping flesh we memorized tales of infinite good. -from The History Lesson

Every time I lock my people in a spacecraft or land them on an asteroid, the blood wells up again, and I'm writing horror. Horror's my default setting. It's also where I prefer to write.

Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .

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.

Truly, there are terrible primal arcana of earth which had better be left unknown and unevoked; dread secrets which have nothing to do with man, and which man may learn only in exchange for peace and sanity; cryptic truths which make the knower evermore an alien among his kind, and cause him to walk alone on earth.

Despite the fact that he's been dead for over seventy years and his prose considered purple and overwrought by many, H.P. Lovecraft's work is still widely read and has remained influential for generations.

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.

The situation has a real Lovecraft feel to it. Though, you know, if you come over it'll be more of an Anne Rice situation. If you know what I mean." "Who's-" "Because you're gay.

When you're talking horror or sci-fi, you're working in a genre that has loosely certain thematic elements, or, you could even call them rules. But rules are there to be broken. I think that young filmmakers should go all the way back to the history of horror, from silent films like "Nosferatu", and through to today's horror films, so they understand the history of horror films and what has been done. Understand that, and then add something new or original.

There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.

If H. P. Lovecraft and H. L. Mencken had ever collaborated, they might have come up with something like The Edge of Reason. This one will delight thinkers-and outrage true believers-of all stripes.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.