Your favorite HPL quotes

[Genus Unknown]

"The Haunter of the Dark" may boast the best prose Lovecraft ever wrote. It's chock-full of great little word-nuggets. One strikes me in the scene where the immigrants living near the evil abandoned church hold a candlelight vigil around it while the lights are out: "a guard of light to protect the city from the nightmare that stalks in darkness."  It's got a Biblical ring to it; reminds me of "the pestilence that walketh in darkness."

[old book]

Yes, Genus, great one there. The whole story seems to be a parody of religiousity, of what happens when the Light of Faith falters, flickers and goes out, and the stygian forces of the Void come rushing in to fill the vacuum.

[osyrisdiamond]

"It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players." -The Rats in the Walls

I especially enjoy the "those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors" part.

I also enjoy "...and I saw my old black cat dart past me like a winged Egyptian god, straight into the illimitable gulf of the unknown" from the same work.

[old book]

"It was the eldritch scurrying of those fiend-born rats, always questing for new horrors, and determined to lead me on even unto those grinning caverns of earth’s centre where Nyarlathotep, the mad faceless god, howls blindly to the piping of two amorphous idiot flute-players." -The Rats in the Walls

I saw a Butthole Surfers show exactly like that once. I think the two amorphous idiot flute-players might've been dancing girls, or perhaps dwarves. It was difficult to make out through the drifting clouds of nitrous oxide.

[old book]

In a vast room hung with strangely figured arras and carpeted with Bokhara rugs of impressive age and workmanship four men were sitting around a document-strown table. From the far corners, where odd tripods of wrought-iron were now and then replenished by an incredibly aged negro in sombre livery, came the hypnotic fumes of olibanum; while in a deep niche on one side there ticked a curious coffin-shaped clock whose dial bore baffling hieroglyphs and whose four hands did not move in consonance with any time system known on this planet.

[yumegari]

I buck the trend:

"When the lovers had finally strolled away he ['Squire Hardman] leapt out into the lane, viciously twirling his moustache and riding-crop, and kicking an unquestionably innocent cat who was also out strolling
'Curses!' he cried--Hardman, not the cat--..."

--Sweet Ermengarde

[Genus Unknown]

A mountain walked or stumbled.

That's chilling (especially in context), and I can't even articulate why.

[old book]

A mountain walked or stumbled.

That's chilling (especially in context), and I can't even articulate why.

This was the content of a nightmare I had in childhood. I don't understand how Lovecraft came up with it.

[Genus Unknown]

There's a great line in the Dream-Quest, when the nightgaunts have dropped Carter off on the sea of bones under the earth:

There was nothing anywhere but blackness and horror and silence and bones.

As simple and effective as an icicle to the kidneys. The repeated use of "and" rather than the more correct commas gives it a kind of musical quality.

[Kaelestes]

“Nothin’ . . . nothin’ . . . the colour . . . it burns . . . cold an’ wet . . . but it burns . . . it lived in the well . . . I seen it . . . a kind o’ smoke . . . jest like the flowers last spring . . . the well shone at night . . . Thad an’ Mernie an’ Zenas . . . everything alive . . . suckin’ the life out of everything . . . in that stone . . . it must a’ come in that stone . . . pizened the whole place . . . dun’t know what it wants . . . that round thing them men from the college dug outen the stone . . . they smashed it . . . it was that same colour . . . jest the same, like the flowers an’ plants . . . must a’ ben more of ’em . . . seeds . . . seeds . . . they growed . . . I seen it the fust time this week . . . must a’ got strong on Zenas . . . he was a big boy, full o’ life . . . it beats down your mind an’ then gits ye . . . burns ye up . . . in the well water . . . you was right about that . . . evil water . . . Zenas never come back from the well . . . can’t git away . . . draws ye . . . ye know summ’at’s comin’, but ’tain’t no use . . . I seen it time an’ agin senct Zenas was took . . . whar’s Nabby, Ammi? . . . my head’s no good . . . dun’t know how long senct I fed her . . . it’ll git her ef we ain’t keerful . . . jest a colour . . . her face is gettin’ to hev that colour sometimes towards night . . . an’ it burns an’ sucks . . . it come from some place whar things ain’t as they is here . . . one o’ them professors said so . . . he was right . . . look out, Ammi, it’ll do suthin’ more . . . sucks the life out. . . .”

This one from The Colour sets my teeth on edge. I love it. Plus, it's one of those rare moments when Lovecraft actually writes dialogue, and it's so perfect. Easily my favorite quote.

[yumegari]

That Colour Out Of Space quote kind of chills me, too, mainly because I tried using it for an acting exercise and holy balls I came to the conclusion that delerious people who can't breathe are scary.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Holy Balls? Is that a Christmas thing in your family?

Bob

[yumegari]

Yes.  Though it's a Festival thing.  We strap them to our Byakhee.

[Bob Lovecraft]

Please invite me to your next X-Mas party.

Bob

[Genus Unknown]

Lovecraft's poetry doesn't normally impress me, but I really love this stanza from "Nemesis:"

I have peer’d from the casement in wonder
            At the mouldering meadows around,
      At the many-roof’d village laid under
            The curse of a grave-girdled ground;
And from rows of white urn-carven marble I listen intently for sound.