Best Quotes from The Call Of Cthulhu by H.P. Lovecraft with Page Numbers

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more.

Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate.

When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

There was nothing within hearing, and nothing in sight save a vast reach of black slime; yet the very completeness of the stillness and the homogeneity of the landscape oppressed me with a nauseating fear.

Such visions as I had experienced were too much for me to endure again.

I felt myself on the edge of the world; peering over the rim into a fathomless chaos of eternal night.

The moon, now near the zenith, shone weirdly and vividly above the towering steeps that hemmed in the chasm.

I stood musing whilst the moon cast queer reflections on the silent channel before me.

Of any land upheaval in the Pacific, my rescuers knew nothing; nor did I deem it necessary to insist upon a thing which I knew they could not believe.

I dream of a day when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war-exhausted mankind.

I can say no more than I have said already.

Everything that I can remember, I have told with perfect candour.

It seems to me rather merciful that I do not retain full comprehension.

I could distinguish a repellent array of antique slabs, urns, cenotaphs, and mausolean facades.

What is it? What is it?

God! If you could see what I am seeing!

It’s too utterly beyond thought—I dare not tell you—no man could know it and live.

For the love of God, put back the slab and get out of this if you can!

Quick—before it’s too late!

YOU FOOL, WARREN IS DEAD!

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.

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species.

If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set fire to his clothing one night.

The Jermyns never seemed to look quite right—something was amiss, though Arthur was the worst.

Madness was in all the Jermyns, and people were glad there were not many of them.

It is hard to say just what he resembled, but his expression, his facial angle, and the length of his arms gave a thrill of repulsion to those who met him for the first time.

Though of poetic rather than scientific temperament, he planned to continue the work of his forefathers in African ethnology and antiquities.

Arthur Jermyn waited very patiently for the expected box from M. Verhaeren, meanwhile studying with increased diligence the manuscripts left by his mad ancestor.

They did not expect to hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream.

The stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species.

In a dream Kuranes saw the city in the valley, and the sea-coast beyond, and the snowy peak overlooking the sea.

What he wrote was laughed at by those to whom he shewed it, so that after a time he kept his writings to himself, and finally ceased to write.

The more he withdrew from the world about him, the more wonderful became his dreams.

Whilst they strove to strip from life its embroidered robes of myth, and to shew in naked ugliness the foul thing that is reality, Kuranes sought for beauty alone.

But some of us awake in the night with strange phantasms of enchanted hills and gardens.

It was moonlight, and he had stolen out into the fragrant summer night.

Faith had urged him on, over the precipice and into the gulf, where he had floated down, down, down.

And Kuranes saw that he need not tremble lest the things he knew be vanished; for even the sentries on the ramparts were the same, and still as young as he remembered them.

But as the highest of the city’s carven towers came into sight there was a sound somewhere in space, and Kuranes awoke in his London garret.

Then they gave Kuranes a horse and placed him at the head of the cavalcade.

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

There was a daemoniac alteration in the sequence of the seasons.

A sense of monstrous guilt was upon the land, and out of the abysses between the stars swept chill currents that made men shiver in dark and lonely places.

Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh.

He spoke much of the sciences—of electricity and psychology—and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless.

And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.

I burned with eagerness to explore his uttermost mysteries.

I heard it hinted abroad that those who knew Nyarlathotep looked on sights which others saw not.

When we began to depend on its light we drifted into curious involuntary formations and seemed to know our destinations.

Screamingly sentient, dumbly delirious, only the gods that were can tell.

Searchers after horror haunt strange, far places.

The haunted wood and the desolate mountain are their shrines.

In such houses have dwelt generations of strange people, whose like the world has never seen.

Divorced from the enlightenment of civilisation, the strength of these Puritans turned into singular channels.

Only the silent, sleepy, staring houses in the backwoods can tell all that has lain hidden since the early days.

I had been travelling for some time amongst the people of the Miskatonic Valley in quest of certain genealogical data.

I had somehow taken it for granted that the house was abandoned.

The appearance of this man, and the instinctive fear he inspired, prepared me for something like enmity.

When I see this I telled Eb Holt, ‘That’s suthin’ ta stir ye up an’ make yer blood tickle!’

As I says, 'tis queer haow picters sets ye thinkin'.

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

And yet I am strangely content, and cling desperately to those sere memories, when my mind momentarily threatens to reach beyond to the other.

I resolved to scale that tower, fall though I might; since it were better to glimpse the sky and perish, than to live without ever beholding day.

Most daemoniacal of all shocks is that of the abysmally unexpected and grotesquely unbelievable.

I neither knew nor cared whether my experience was insanity, dreaming, or magic; but was determined to gaze on brilliance and gaiety at any cost.

I cannot hint what it was like, for it was a compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable.

But in the cosmos there is balm as well as bitterness, and that balm is nepenthe.

For although nepenthe has calmed me, I know always that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

In my new wildness and freedom I almost welcome the bitterness of alienage.

I stretched out my fingers to the abomination within that great gilded frame; stretched out my fingers and touched a cold and unyielding surface of polished glass.

Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities.

To hear him discussing ways and means was rather ghastly.

It was this circumstance which made the professors so carelessly sceptical.

A certain number of these failures had remained alive.

Their outlines were human, semi-human, fractionally human, and not human at all.

I shudder tonight as I think of it; shudder even more than I did that morning.

It had not left behind quite all that it had attacked, for sometimes it had been hungry.

He nursed an increasing resentment, coupled with a desire to prove his theories.

Age has more charity for these incomplete yet highsouled characters.

It was obviously not a pleasing or ordinary occurrence.

It is not dream—it is not, I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts.

Wearied with the commonplaces of a prosaic world, where even the joys of romance and adventure soon grow stale.

It was this frightful emotional need which led us eventually to that detestable course which even in my present fear I mention with shame and timidity.

Our museum was a blasphemous, unthinkable place, where with the satanic taste of neurotic virtuosi we had assembled an universe of terror and decay to excite our jaded sensibilities.

We were no vulgar ghouls, but worked only under certain conditions of mood, landscape, environment, weather, season, and moonlight.

We thought we heard the faint distant baying of some gigantic hound in the background.

I cannot reveal the details of our shocking expeditions.

Being now afraid to live alone in the ancient house on the moor, I departed on the following day for London.

I knew not why I went thither unless to pray, or gibber out insane pleas and apologies.

Madness rides the star-wind... dripping death astride a Bacchanale of bats from night-black ruins.

Every attribute of the Middle Ages was cunningly reproduced, and the new parts blended perfectly with the original walls and foundations.

I looked forward to redeeming at last the local fame of the line which ended in me.

Something astounding had occurred, and I saw that Capt. Norrys, a younger, stouter, and presumably more naturally materialistic man, was affected fully as much as myself.

What secret would open the gate, wiser men than we would have to find.

I found my vigil occasionally mixed with half-formed dreams from which the uneasy motions of the cat across my feet would rouse me.

We are all conscious of the horrors that lie hidden in our pasts.

Only those who seek knowledge can uncover the truths that haunt our family lines.

At the threshold of discovery, courage is as essential as knowledge.

We shall never know what sightless Stygian worlds yawn beyond the little distance we went.

The world of our ancestors is a realm of untold stories that shape our existence.

I was far from home, and the spell of the eastern sea was upon me.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their heads it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind.

Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before.

I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember.

I saw that it was a burying-ground where black gravestones stuck ghoulishly through the snow like the decayed fingernails of a gigantic corpse.

Though it pleased me, I would have relished it better if there had been footprints in the snow, and people in the streets, and a few windows without drawn curtains.

I resolved to expect queer things.

And in the Stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation.

I shuddered, for it is indeed not new to me. I had seen it before, let footprints tell what they might.

The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific.

My coming to New York had been a mistake; for whereas I had looked for poignant wonder and inspiration... I had found instead only a sense of horror and oppression.

Shortly afterward I was taken through those antique ways so dear to my fancy... I thought I had indeed achieved such treasures as would make me in time a poet.

But success and happiness were not to be.

And I saw at last a fearful truth which no one had ever dared to breathe before... but that it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed.

With this mode of relief I even wrote a few poems, and still refrained from going home to my people lest I seem to crawl back ignobly in defeat.

He had, he said, noticed me several times at my wanderings; and inferred that I resembled him in loving the vestiges of former years.

For years they stole over the wall each month when they could, and by stealth performed sartain acts.

What we want, we may make about us; and what we don’t want, we may sweep away.

I shuddered as the man grew colloquial—and with familiar speech of another day.

I never sought to return to those tenebrous labyrinths, nor would I direct any sane man thither if I could.

It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude.

...there lingered a depressing mustiness and hint of obscure cookery.

There is an infinite deal of pathos in the state of an eminent person who has come down in the world.

Will and consciousness are stronger than organic life itself.

A kind of growing horror, of outré and morbid cast, seemed to possess him.

There are things about which it is better not to speculate.

...the tissues can’t last.

It was good theory, but couldn’t keep up indefinitely.

He couldn’t stand what he had to do—he had to get me in a strange, dark place.

...I fancy you know—what I said about the will and the nerves and the preserved body after the organs ceased to 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 infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.

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 deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.

In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities; and dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon.

A chaotic sensation which only fancy would transmute into sound.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky.

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.

What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise.

It is not because of anything that can be seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is imagined.

And the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep’s secrets; one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal earth.

There was too much silence in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.

It was too much like a landscape of Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of terror.

I knew it the moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no other name could fit such a thing, or any other thing fit such a name.

It was better under water now—better under water since the strange days.

But even then I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night—at least, not when the sinister stars are out.

It must all be a judgment of some sort; though he could not fancy what for, since he had always walked uprightly in the Lord’s ways so far as he knew.

I do not think I shall visit the Arkham country hereafter.

What it is, only God knows.

I have seen footprints, and of late have seen them nearer my own home than I dare tell you now.

There is a great black stone with unknown hieroglyphics half worn away which I found in the woods on Round Hill... If they think I suspect too much they will either kill me or take me off the earth to where they come from.

Heaven knows there is peril enough anyway.

It is true—terribly true—that there are non-human creatures watching us all the time.

People must be kept away from these hills, and in order to effect this, their curiosity ought not to be aroused any further.

But the creatures are so far beyond our understanding that to intrude would be like giving a child the keys to a car.

To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience.

They seem to be trying to get the black stone back and destroy the phonograph record...

My own studies are now wholly private, and I would not think of saying anything to attract people’s attention.

The things come from another planet, being able to live in interstellar space... They could easily conquer the earth, but have not tried so far because they have not needed to.

It helps me, too, in making up my mind regarding a certain terrible step which lies ahead of me.

A town able to inspire such dislike in its neighbours, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist’s attention.

I felt a singular sense of disquiet in looking at the lonely crest ahead.

The mere telling helps me to restore confidence in my own faculties; to reassure myself that I was not simply the first to succumb to a contagious nightmare hallucination.

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours.

If you’re just sightseeing, and looking for old-time stuff, Innsmouth ought to be quite a place for you.

I gathered impressions which are yet to drive me to drastic measures.

I now have the primal power of the sea and the monstrous memories rising within me.

There must be something like that back of the Innsmouth people.

Each shadow cast by the moon seemed to whisper secrets long lost to light.

I have seen the dark universe yawning Where the black planets roll without aim—Where they roll in their horror unheeded, Without knowledge or lustre or name.

Now, studying the diary closely, dispassionately, and at leisure, let us summarise the dark chain of events from the expressed point of view of their chief actor.

Having sent home for most of his books, Blake bought some antique furniture suitable to his quarters and settled down to write and paint—living alone, and attending to the simple housework himself.

Even with optical aid Federal Hill seemed somehow alien, half fabulous, and linked to the unreal, intangible marvels of Blake’s own tales and pictures.

He realized that he had freed something from the ultimate black spaces.

This place had once been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.

He seemed to feel a constant tugging at his will, and callers of that period remember how he would sit abstractedly at his desk.

The lightning must be dark and the darkness must be light...I can see everything with a monstrous sense that is not sight.

My name is Blake—Robert Harrison Blake...I am on this planet.

It knows where I am.