Best Line/Worst Line (The Silver Key)

[Renegade]

Best
""Wise men had told him his simple fancies were inane and childish, and even more absurd because their actors persist on fancying them full of meaning and purpose as the blind cosmos grinds aimlessly on from nothing to something and from something back to nothing again, neither heeding nor knowing the wishes or existence of the minds that flicker for a second now and then in the darkness"

Its just so awesome, I cant put it into words.

Worst:
"It gave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices."

I know Lovecraft is all about anti-description and I'm usually a huge supporter of it, but this has no semblance of his usual creativity. It literally tells me nothing and gives no hints to anything out of the ordinary. might as well have said "Cant hear anything inside it and it smells weird."

[Chris Lackey]

I think we pull both of those quotes. But don't quote me on that.

[Phil]

"Cant hear anything inside it and it smells weird."

That's hilarious 

Also loved your choice of best line - totally agree on it's awesome-ness!

[Renegade]

"His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writings."

Randolph Carter, a hipster BEFORE it was cool.

[stevenroy]

I thought this was a great line:

"Wonder had gone away, and he had forgotten that all life is only a set of pictures in the brain, among which there is no difference betwixt those born of real things and those born of inward dreamings, and no cause to value the one above the other."

[old book]

"It gave forth no noise when shaken, but was mystic with the scent of unremembered spices."

This is actually very metrical in a way. It's written in a way that call attention to itself, as if it were a cypher. Mystic, Rhode Island? Unremembered Spice as the US? Silent issue?

I agree the first line quoted in the first post, with its blind astral determinism and gnostic revolt, is more interesting.

[Ruth - CthulhuChick]

"His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writings."

Randolph Carter, a hipster BEFORE it was cool.

I was thinking this and wondering what Lovecraft would've made of hipsters.

[old book]

"His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be to please an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writings."

Randolph Carter, a hipster BEFORE it was cool.

I was thinking this and wondering what Lovecraft would've made of hipsters.

I think the lad Wilcox who dreams ancient dream older than Tyre and Babylon in Call of Cthulhu probably fits the bill. Hipster isn't by any means a new word, btw. Centuries ago they used to say Hep, which turned into hip hip hooray and hepcat, but there were some anti-Semitic origins to Hep as a slogan in Europe as well. Pickman certainly has had communication with a kind of hipster crowd in Boston too, I'd think.