Literary Birthday – 20 August – H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft was born on 20 August 1890 and died on 15 March 1937.

H.P. Lovecraft Quotes

1. The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.
2. If religion were true, its followers would not try to bludgeon their young into an artificial conformity; but would merely insist on their unbending quest for truth, irrespective of artificial backgrounds or practical consequences.
3. I couldn’t live a week without a private library – indeed, I’d part with all my furniture and squat and sleep on the floor before I’d let go of the 1500 or so books I possess.
4. Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.
5. I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.
6. Creative minds are uneven, and the best of fabrics have their dull spots.
7. The most merciful thing in the world… is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
8. Contrary to what you may assume, I am not a pessimist but an indifferentist- that is, I don’t make the mistake of thinking that the… cosmos… gives a damn one way or the the other about the especial wants and ultimate welfare of mosquitoes, rats, lice, dogs, men, horses, pterodactyls, trees, fungi, dodos, or other forms of biological energy.
9. The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.
10. Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
11. As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, [and] steel their emotions against decent human sympathy.
12. The cat is such a perfect symbol of beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic to do other than worship it.

Suggested reading: Horror Masters: 3 Spooky Tips To Write Like Lovecraft, Poe, & King

H.P. Lovecraft was an iconic American writer best known for his influential work in weird fiction, horror, science fiction, and fantasy. His writing is based on cosmicism, the idea that humanity is small and insignificant in an enormous and largely unknowable universe. Lovecraft began writing and publishing stories early in his career, but he struggled to earn a living from his work. During his lifetime, he was unknown outside the world of pulp magazines. Some of his best-known works include The Call of Cthulhu, The Shadow Out of Time, and At the Mountains of Madness. His stories often feature ancient forces, strange worlds, forbidden knowledge, and characters who discover that the universe is far more frightening than they imagined. Lovecraft died in 1937, but his reputation grew after his death. His stories helped shape modern horror and made him one of the most influential writers of the 20th-century Gothic tradition. His influence can be seen in the work of writers and filmmakers such as Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro, while the term ‘Lovecraftian horror’ has become widely used to describe stories about cosmic terror and humanity’s powerlessness before forces beyond its understanding.

Source for Image: Lucius B. Truesdell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:H._P._Lovecraft,_June_1934.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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