H. P. Lovecraft Zitate (233 Zitate, seite 4)

H. P. Lovecraft: 233 Zitate 88 Gefällt mir

H. P. Lovecraft Berühmte Zitate

„Das älteste und stärkste Gefühl ist Angst, die älteste und stärkste Form der Angst, ist die Angst vor dem Unbekannten.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Supernatural Horror in Literature http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Supernatural_Horror_in_Literature, (1938), Einleitung
Original engl.: "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown."

„Wir leben auf einer friedlichen Insel der Ahnungslosigkeit inmitten schwarzer Meere der Unendlichkeit, und es war nicht vorgesehen, dass wir diese Gewässer weit befahren sollen.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

„Das älteste und mächtigste Gefühl der Menschheit ist Angst.“

H. P. Lovecraft

„Fast niemand tanzt nüchtern, es sei denn, er ist verrückt.“

H. P. Lovecraft

„Es wäre ihnen ein Leichtes, die Erde zu erobern, sie haben es aber bislang nicht versucht, weil dazu keine Notwendigkeit bestand. Sie lassen die Dinge lieber so, wie sie sind, und ersparen sich die Scherereien.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

„Unglücklich ist derjenige, dem Erinnerungen an die Kindheit nur Angst und Trauer bringen.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Zitate über die Welt von H. P. Lovecraft

„Die größte Gnade auf dieser Welt ist, so scheint es mir, das Nichtvermögen des menschlichen Geistes, all ihre inneren Geschehnisse miteinander in Verbindung zu bringen. Wir leben auf einem friedlichen Eiland des Ungewissens inmitten schwarzer Meere der Unendlichkeit, und es ist uns nicht bestimmt, diese weit zu bereisen. Die Wissenschaften - deren jede in eine eigene Richtung zielt - haben uns bis jetzt wenig gekümmert; aber eines Tages wird das Zusammenfügen der einzelnen Erkenntnisse so erschreckende Aspekte der Wirklichkeit eröffnen, dass wir durch diese Enthüllung entweder dem Wahnsinn verfallen oder uns aus dem tödlichen Licht in den Frieden und die Sicherheit eines neuen, dunklen Zeitalters fliehen werden.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Cthulhu Geistergeschichten

„Die größte Gnade auf dieser Welt ist, so scheint es mir, das Nichtvermögen des menschlichen Geistes, all ihre inneren Geschehnisse miteinander in Verbindung zu bringen.“

H. P. Lovecraft buch Cthulhus Ruf

"Cthulhus Ruf", z. B: in "Cthulhu Geistergeschichten", suhrkamp taschenbuch, dritte Auflage 1975, Seite 193, übersetzt von H. C. Artmann
Original engl.: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." - The Call of Cthulhu.

„Die Welt ist in der Tat komisch, aber der Witz geht auf die Menschheit.“

H. P. Lovecraft

„Sie verachteten die Welt, als hätten sie Zugang zu anderen und vorzüglicheren Daseinssphären.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol 2

H. P. Lovecraft Zitate und Sprüche

„Nichtsdestotrotz habet Ihr starke Hände, ein Messer und eine Pistole, und es ist nicht schwer, ein Grab zu schaufeln.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Schwester , Stark

„Nyarlathotep… das kriechende Chaos… Ich bin der letzte… Ich werde es der lauschenden Leere verkünden…“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

„Gerade jetzt, wo ich drauf und dran bin den Nebel zu zerteilen, muß mir das Testmaterial ausgehen - und du rätst mir, mich wieder in blöde Benommenheit zurücksinken zu lassen! Mein Gott! Und unterdessen arbeitet wahrscheinlich irgend so ein gewissenloser Dieb mit meinen Daten und bereitet sich darauf vor, eher zu publizieren als ich und den Ruhm für meine Arbeit einzuheimsen. Ich werde um eine Nasenlänge verlieren - irgendein Narr, der genügend Testmaterial zur Verfügung hat, wird Sieger werden, obwohl ich, wenn ich nur halbwegs angemessene Arbeitsbedingungen hätte, schon in einer Woche mit fliegenden Fahnen durchs Ziel gehen könnte!“

H. P. Lovecraft

The Horror in the Museum & Other Revisions

Über Gott , Fliegend

„Eine Stimme aus anderen Zeiten gehört in einen Friedhof anderer Zeiten.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol 2

Zeit

„In seinem Verhalten schien eine kryptische, sardonische Arroganz zu lauern, als ödeten ihn alle menschlichen Wesen nur noch an.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Verhalten

„… und der ganze Erdball würde durch eine Fackel aus Ekstase und Freiheit in Flammen gesetzt.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Freiheit

„So erweckte er eher den Eindruck harmloser Unbeholfenheit, als attraktiv zu wirken.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

„Ihre Hand ist an eurer Kehle, doch seht ihr Sie nicht.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

„Vorsicht ist die erste Sorge jener, die gelegentliche Scharlatanerie und Betrug gewöhnt sind.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Betrug

„Befragt die Geringeren, auf daß nicht die Größeren Euch antworten und mehr heraufbeschwören, als Ihr vermöget“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

„sie hieß mich mit einer Warmherzigkeit willkommen, die geradezu hämisch war.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol 2

„Erinnerungen und Möglichkeiten werden immer ekelhafter als die Realität.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Erinnerung

„Der Wind rauscht mit Ihren Stimmen, und die Erde grollt durch Ihren Geist.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

„Es schien mir recht bedauerlich, dass Derby sich gerade für sie interessierte, sagte aber nichts dazu, da Vernarrtheit an Widerstand bloß gedeiht.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol 2

„Auf einem der letzten und zerfallensten Reliefs fiel uns ein watschelndes, primitives Säugetier besonders ins Auge, das von den Landbewohnern teils als Schlachtvieh, teils als lustiger Spaßmacher gehalten wurde – seine affenartigen und menschlichen Ansätze waren nicht zu übersehen.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol 2

„denn dann sei die Menschheit wie die Großen Alten geworden; frei und ungezähmt und jenseits von Gut und Böse, und jedes Gesetz und jede Moral sei zur Seite gefegt, und alle Menschen würden schreien und töten und sich in Lust ergehen.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Über Gesetze , Über Menschen , tot , Böse

„jedenfalls hörte ich Donnerschläge und andere Geräusche, welche die Natur nur im Zorne von sich gibt.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

Über natur , Zorn

„Denn dieser Ort konnte keine gewöhnliche Stadt sein – er musste den ursprünglichen Kern und Mittelpunkt irgendeines urzeitlichen und unfassbaren Kapitels der Erdgeschichte gebildet haben, der nur in den dunkelsten und verzerrtesten Mythen vagen Widerhall findet und vom Chaos der Erdwehen verschlungen wurde, lange bevor irgendeine uns bekannte Menschenrasse aus dem Affenstadium herauswatschelte“

H. P. Lovecraft

Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, Vol 2

„Wir leben unsere Leben auf einer kleinen Insel der Blindheit, ohne die Vorstellung der dunklen Ozeane der Unendlichkeit um uns herum. Wir sollten uns nicht zu viel umsehen.“

H. P. Lovecraft

Über Leben

„Das Vergnügen ist für mich ein Wunder - das Unerforschte, das Unerwartete, das Verborgene und das Unveränderliche, das sich hinter der oberflächlichen Wandlungsfähigkeit verbirgt.“

H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft: Zitate auf Englisch

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Kontext: 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 infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but 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.

“One of those creatures wrote you once, ‘do not call up any that you can not put down’.”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

often phrased as "Do not call up that which you cannot put down."
Fiction
Quelle: "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", written 1927, first published in Weird Tales, July 1941

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)
Kontext: It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes. As it was, lacking their original letters, I half suspected the compiler of having asked leading questions, or of having edited the correspondence in corroboration of what he had latently resolved to see.

“The end is near. I hear a noise at the door, as of some immense slippery body lumbering against it. It shall not find me. God, that hand! The window! The window!”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch Dagon

Fiction
Quelle: "Dagon" - Written Jul 1917; First published in The Vagrant, No. 11 (November 1919)

“Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

"Beyond the Wall of Sleep" in Pine Cones, Vol. 1, No. 6 (October 1919)
Fiction

“There are black zones of shadow close to our daily paths, and now and then some evil soul breaks a passage through. When this happens the man who knows must strike before reckoning the consequences.”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch The Thing on the Doorstep

Fiction
Quelle: "The Thing on the Doorstep" (1937), first published in Weird Tales

“I am, indeed, an absolute materialist so far as actual belief goes; with not a shred of credence in any form of supernaturalism—religion, spiritualism, transcendentalism, metempsychosis, or immortality.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

“I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch Old Bugs

Quelle: Old Bugs

“When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live.”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch Cthulhus Ruf

Quelle: The Call of Cthulhu

“In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative.”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch The Tomb

"The Tomb" - Written Jun 1917; first published in The Vagrant, No. 14 (March 1922)
Fiction
Kontext: In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

“The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (15 August 1934) , quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 268
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

“Sometimes when earth's gods are homesick they visit in the still of the night the peaks where once they dwelt, and weep softly as they try to play in the olden way on remembered slopes.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Other Gods (1921)

“The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind—yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy. … The whole basis of religion is a symbolic emotionalism which modern knowledge has rendered meaningless & even unhealthy. Today we know that the cosmos is simply a flux of purposeless rearrangement amidst which man is a wholly negligible incident or accident. There is no reason why it should be otherwise, or why we should wish it otherwise. All the florid romancing about man's "dignity", "immortality", &c. &c. is simply egotistical delusions plus primitive ignorance. So, too, are the infantile concepts of "sin" or cosmic "right" & "wrong". Actually, organic life on our planet is simply a momentary spark of no importance or meaning whatsoever. Man matters to nobody except himself. Nor are his "noble" imaginative concepts any proof of the objective reality of the things they visualise. Psychologists understand how these concepts are built up out of fragments of experience, instinct, & misapprehension. Man is essentially a machine of a very complex sort, as La Mettrie recognised nearly 2 centuries ago. He arises through certain typical chemical & physical reactions, & his members gradually break down into their constituent parts & vanish from existence. The idea of personal "immortality" is merely the dream of a child or savage. However, there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social in such a realistic view of things. Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities. It has a fortuitous jumble of reactions, some of which it instinctively seeks to heighten & prolong, & some of which it instinctively seeks to shorten or lessen. Also, we see that certain courses of action tend to increase its radius of comprehension & degree of specialised organisation (things usually promoting the wished-for reactions, & in general removing the species from a clod-like, unorganised state), while other courses of action tend to exert an opposite effect. Now since man means nothing to the cosmos, it is plan that his only logical goal (a goal whose sole reference is to himself) is simply the achievement of a reasonable equilibrium which shall enhance his likelihood of experiencing the sort of reactions he wishes, & which shall help along his natural impulse to increase his differentiation from unorganised force & matter. This goal can be reached only through teaching individual men how best to keep out of each other's way, & how best to reconcile the various conflicting instincts which a haphazard cosmic drift has placed within the breast of the same person. Here, then, is a practical & imperative system of ethics, resting on the firmest possible foundation & being essentially that taught by Epicurus & Lucretius. It has no need of supernatualism, & indeed has nothing to do with it.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (2 May 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 240-241
Non-Fiction, Letters

“That cult would never die till the stars came right again, and the secret priests would take great Cthulhu from His tomb to revive His subjects and resume His rule of earth. The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. Meanwhile the cult, by appropriate rites, must keep alive the memory of those ancient ways and shadow forth the prophecy of their return.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“I am only about half alive—a large part of my strength is consumed in sitting up or walking. My nervous system is a shattered wreck, and I am absolutely bored & listless save when I come upon something which peculiarly interests me. However—so many things do interest me, & interest me intensely, in science, history, philosophy, & literature; that I have never actually desired to die, or entertained any suicidal designs, as might be expected of one with so little kinship to the ordinary features of life.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Alfred Galpin (27 May 1918), published in Letters to Alfred Galpin edited by S. T. Joshi, p. 18
Non-Fiction, Letters

“I was obviously floating in the atmosphere; companioned not only by the strange child and the radiant pair, but by a constantly increasing throng of half-luminous, vine-crowned youths and maidens with wind-blown hair and joyful countenance. We slowly ascended together, as if borne on a fragrant breeze which blew not from the earth but from the golden nebulae, and the child whispered in my ear that I must look always upward to the pathways of light, and never backward to the sphere I had just left.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)

“There is no field other than the weird in which I have any aptitude or inclination for fictional composition. Life has never interested me so much as the escape from life.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to J. Vernon Shea (7 August 1931), quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 579
Non-Fiction, Letters

“I screamed aloud that I was not afraid; that I never could be afraid; and others screamed with me for solace. We swore to one another that the city was exactly the same, and still alive…”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch Nyarlathotep

"Nyarlathotep" (1920)
Fiction

“Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it. That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things — in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor….”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Call of Cthulhu (1926)

“I found myself projected against an obstacle which I could not penetrate. It was like the others, yet incalculably denser; a sticky clammy mass, if such terms can be applied to analogous qualities in a non-material sphere.
I had, I felt, been halted by a barrier which my friend and leader had successfully passed. Struggling anew, I came to the end of the drug-dream…”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, Hypnos (1922)

“I do differ from you radically in respect to familiar things & scenes; for I always demand close correlation with the landscape & historic stream to which I belong, & would feel completely lost in infinity without a system of reference-points based on known & accustomed objects. I take complete relativity so much for granted, that I cannot conceive of anything as existing in itself in any recognisable form. What gives things an aspect & quasi-significance to us is the fact that we view things consistently from a certain artificial & fortuitous angle. Without the preservation of that angle, coherent consciousness & entity itself becomes inconceivable. Thus my wish for freedom is not so much a wish to put all terrestrial things behind me & plunge forever into abysses beyond light, matter, & energy. That, indeed, would mean annihilation as a personality rather than liberation. My wish is perhaps best defined as a wish for infinite visioning & voyaging power, yet without loss of the familiar background which gives all things significance. I want to know what stretches Outside, & be able to visit all the gulfs & dimensions beyond Space & Time. I want, too, to juggle the calendar at will; bringing things from the immemorial past down into the present, & making long journeys into the forgotten years. But I want the familiar Old Providence of my childhood as a perpetual base for these necromancies & excursions—& in a good part of these necromancies & excursions I want certain transmuted features of Old Providence to form part of the alien voids I visit or conjure up. I am as geographic-minded as a cat—places are everything to me. Long observation has shewn me that no other objective experience can give me even a quarter of the kick I can extract from the sight of a fresh landscape or urban vista whose antiquity & historic linkages are such as to correspond with certain fixed childhood dream-patterns of mine. Of course my twilight cosmos of half-familiar, fleetingly remembered marvels is just as unattainable as your Ultimate Abysses—this being the real secret of its fascination. Nothing really known can continue to be acutely fascinating—the charm of many familiar things being mainly resident in their power to symbolise or suggest unknown extensions & overtones.”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Clark Ashton Smith (7 November 1930), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 214
Non-Fiction, Letters

“Some terror in the swishing tall grass seemed added to that of the diabolically pounding sea, and I started up crying aloud and disjointedly, "Tiger? Tiger? Is it Tiger? Beast? Beast? Is it a Beast that I am afraid of?"”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Fiction, The Crawling Chaos (1921)

“It is only the inferior thinker who hastens to explain the singular and the complex by the primitive shortcut of supernaturalism.”

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H.P. Lovecraft buch The Temple

"The Temple" - Written 1920; first published in Weird Tales, 6 No. 3 (September 1925)
Fiction

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

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H.P. Lovecraft

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters