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And Where Nyarlathotep Went, Rest Vanished, For The Small Hours Were Rent With The Screams Of Nightmare.
-H. P. Lovecraft
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And Where Nyarlathotep Went,

H. P. Lovecraft
...
And Where Nyarlathotep Went, Rest Vanished, For The Small Hours Were Rent With The Screams Of Nightmare.

Understanding the Quote: "and where nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent..."

This quote by H. P. Lovecraft reflects deeply on the theme of nightmare. It connects to the universal human journey of purpose, motivation, and reflection. Often categorized under Nightmare, Scream, Hours, the quote offers insight, emotional clarity, and intellectual inspiration to readers worldwide.

Whether you’re a student exploring new ideas, a leader trying to motivate your team, or someone seeking direction in life — this quote provides value. It resonates because it’s more than words — it’s a bridge between experience and wisdom. It shows how H. P. Lovecraft interprets life's core challenges and triumphs.

Lessons From the Quote

This quote teaches resilience and focus. It reminds readers that no matter where they stand in life, reflection and self-awareness lead to growth. Each word has meaning, and when studied, it becomes clear how impactful thoughtful language can be.

About H. P. Lovecraft

H. P. Lovecraft is celebrated for insightful thoughts on nightmare and scream. Their legacy lives on through writings that guide, comfort, and inspire. Discover more on their profile page.

Actionable Takeaways

  • Reflect on how this quote applies to your current life path.
  • Share the message with someone who needs inspiration.
  • Write your thoughts on this quote in a journal or blog post.
  • Use it as a daily affirmation or reminder.

Closing Thoughts

Quotes like this endure because they capture universal truths. They comfort us in solitude and empower us in groups. Carry this quote forward — live by its wisdom, share its message, and keep its essence alive.

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Topic
Nightmare
Scream
Hours
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Good And Evil And Beauty And Ugliness Are Only Ornamental Fruits Of Perspective, Whose Sole Value Lies In Their Linkage To What Chance Made Our Fathers Think And Feel, And Whose Finer Details Are Different For Every Race And Culture.
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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.
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If I Could Create An Ideal World, It Would Be An England With The Fire Of The Elizabethans, The Correct Taste Of The Georgians, And The Refinement And Pure Ideals Of The Victorians.
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The World Is Indeed Comic, But The Joke Is On Mankind.
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I Am Disillusioned Enough To Know That No Man's Opinion On Any Subject Is Worth A Damn Unless Backed Up With Enough Genuine Information To Make Him Really Know What He's Talking About.
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There Be Those Who Say That Things And Places Have Souls, And There Be Those Who Say They Have Not; I Dare Not Say, Myself, But I Will Tell Of The Street.
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Race Prejudice Is A Gift Of Nature, Intended To Preserve In Purity The Various Divisions Of Mankind Which The Ages Have Evolved.
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It Is Good To Be A Cynic - It Is Better To Be A Contented Cat - And It Is Best Not To Exist At All. Universal Suicide Is The Most Logical Thing In The World - We Reject It Only Because Of Our Primitive Cowardice And Childish Fear Of The Dark. If We Were Sensible We Would Seek Death - The Same Blissful Blank Which We Enjoyed Before We Existed.
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It Is Good To Be A Cynic - It Is Better To Be A Contented Cat - And It Is Best Not To Exist At All.
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Because We Remember Pain And The Menace Of Death More Vividly Than Pleasure, And Because Our Feelings Toward The Beneficent Aspects Of The Unknown Have From The First Been Captured And Formalised By Conventional Religious Rituals, It Has Fallen To The Lot Of The Darker And More Maleficent Side Of Cosmic Mystery To Figure Chiefly In Our Popular Supernatural Folklore.
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I Could Not Help Feeling That They Were Evil Things -- Mountains Of Madness Whose Farther Slopes Looked Out Over Some Accursed Ultimate Abyss.
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Thus I Began My Systematic Though Half-bewildered Tour Of Innsmouth's Narrow, Shadow-blighted Ways. Crossing The Bridge And Turning Toward The Roar Of The Lower Falls, I Passed Close To The Marsh Refinery, Which Seemed To Be Oddly Free From The Noise Of Industry. The Building Stood On The Steep River Bluff Near A Bridge And An Open Confluence Of Streets Which I Took To Be The Earliest Civic Center, Displaced After The Revolution By The Present Town Square.
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The Monotony Of A Long Heroic Poem May Often Be Pleasantly Relieved By Judicious Interruptions In The Perfect Successions Of Rhymes, Just As The Metre May Sometimes Be Adorned With Occasional Triplets And Alexandrines.
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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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The Glorious Dryden, Refiner And Purifier Of English Verse, Did Less For Rhyme Than He Did For Metre.
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Toil Without Song Is Like A Weary Journey Without An End.
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May The Merciful God, If Indeed There Be Such, Guard Those Hours When No Power Of The Will, Or Drug That The Cunning Of Man Devises, Can Keep Me From The Chasm Of Sleep. Death Is Merciful, For There Is No Return Therefrom, But With Him Who Has Come Back Out Of The Nethermost Chambers Of Night, Haggard And Knowing, Peace Rests Nevermore.
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Method
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If I Am Mad, It Is Mercy! May The Gods Pity The Man Who In His Callousness Can Remain Sane To The Hideous End!
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Life
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Past
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Government
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Intellectual
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I'll Tell You Something Of The Forbidden Horrors She Led Me Into - Something Of The Age-old Horrors That Even Now Are Festering In Out-of-the-way Corners With A Few Monstrous Priests To Keep Them Alive. Some People Know Things About The Universe That Nobody Ought To Know, And Can Do Things That Nobody Ought To Be Able To Do.
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Age
Alive
One Can't Write A Weird Story Of Real Power Without Perfect Psychological Detachment From The Human Scene, And A Magic Prism Of Imagination Which Suffuses Them And Style Alike With That Grotesquerie And Disquieting Distortion Characteristic Of Morbid Vision. Only A Cynic Can Create Horror - For Behind Every Masterpiece Of The Sort Must Reside A Driving Daemonic Force That Despises The Human Race And Its Illusions, And Longs To Pull Them To Pieces And Mock Them.
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Nothing Matters, But It's Perhaps More Comfortable To Keep Calm And Not Interfere With Other People.
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Matter
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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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Good Art Means The Ability Of Any One Man To Pin Down In Some Permanent And Intelligible Medium A Sort Of Idea Of What He Sees In Nature That Nobody Else Sees. In Other Words, To Make The Other Fellow Grasp, Through Skilled Selective Care In Interpretative Reproduction Or Symbolism, Some Inkling Of What Only The Artist Himself Could Possibly See In The Actual Objective Scene Itself.
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Mean
Men
Intellectually, The Republican Idea Deserves The Tolerance And Respect One Gives To The Dead.
Ideas
Giving
Tolerance
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Life
Stars
Unique
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.
Believe
Life Is
Sometimes
Non- Euclidean Calculus And Quantum Physics Are Enough To Stretch Any Brain; And When One Mixes Them With Folklore, And Tries To Trace A Strange Background Of Multi-dimensional Reality Behind The Ghoulish Hints Of Gothic Tales And The Wild Whispers Of The Chimney-corner, One Can Hardly Expect To Be Wholly Free From Mental Tension. (dreams In The Witch-house)
Dream
Reality
House
While My Chosen Form Of Story-writing Is Obviously A Special And Perhaps A Narrow One, It Is None The Less A Persistent And Permanent Type Of Expression, As Old As Literature Itself. There Will Always Be A Certain Small Percentage Of Persons Who Feel A Burning Curiosity About Unknown Outer Space, And A Burning Desire To Escape From The Prison-house Of The Known And The Real Into Those Enchanted Lands Of Incredible Adventure And Infinite Possibilities Which Dreams Open Up To Us, And Which Things Like Deep Woods, Fantastic Urban Towers, And Flaming Sunsets Momentarily Suggest.
Dream
Real
Writing
More Wonderful Than The Lore Of Old Men And The Lore Of Books Is The Secret Lore Of The Ocean. Blue, Green, Grey, White, Or Black; Smooth, Ruffled, Or Mountainous; That Ocean Is Not Silent. All My Days I Have Watched It And Listened To It, And I Know It Well. At First It Told To Me Only The Plain Little Tales Of Calm Beaches And Near Ports, But With The Years It Grew More Friendly And Spoke Of Other Things; Of Things More Strange And More Distant In Space And Time.
Beach
Ocean
Book
All I Say Is That I Think It Is Damned Unlikely That Anything Like A Central Cosmic Will, A Spirit World, Or An Eternal Survival Of Personality Exist. They Are The Most Preposterous And Unjustified Of All The Guesses Which Can Be Made About The Universe, And I Am Not Enough Of A Hair-splitter To Pretend That I Don't Regard Them As Arrant And Negligible Moonshine. In Theory I Am An Agnostic, But Pending The Appearance Of Radical Evidence I Must Be Classed, Practically And Provisionally, As An Atheist.
Atheist
Thinking
Hair
Maybe, Just Maybe, I Should Not Have Used The Word "eldritch" So Many Times Now That I Think About It.
Thinking
Used
Should
Religion Is Still Useful Among The Herd - That It Helps Their Orderly Conduct As Nothing Else Could. The Crude Human Animal Is In-eradicably Superstitious, And There Is Every Biological Reason Why They Should Be. Take Away His Christian God And Saints, And He Will Worship Something Else.
Christian
Animal
Saint
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.
Doubt
Narrative
Authenticity
Everything I Loved Had Been Dead For Two Centuries - Or, As In The Case Of Graeco-roman Classicism, For Two Milenniums. I Am Never A Part Of Anything Around Me - In Everything I Am An Outsider. Should I Find It Possible To Crawl Backward Through The Halls Of Time To That Age Which Is Nearest My Own Fancy, I Should Doubtless Be Bawled Out Of The Coffee-houses For Heresy In Religion, Or Else Lampooned By John Dennis Till I Found Refuge In The Deep, Silent Thames, That Covers Many Another Unfortunate.
Coffee
Two
House
After Man There Would Be The Mighty Beetle Civilisation, The Bodies Of Whose Members The Cream Of The Great Race Would Seize When The Monstrous Doom Overtook The Elder World. Later, As The Earth's Span Closed, The Transferred Minds Would Again Migrate Through Time And Space -- To Another Stopping Place In The Bodies Of The Bulbous Vegetable Entities Of Mercury. But There Would Be Races After Them, Clinging Pathetically To The Cold Planet And Burrowing To Its Horror-filled Core, Before The Utter End.
Men
Vegetables
Civilization
In Its Flawless Grace And Superior Self-sufficiency I Have Seen A Symbol Of The Perfect Beauty And Bland Impersonality Of The Universe Itself, Objectively Considered, And In Its Air Of Silent Mystery There Resides For Me All The Wonder And Fascination Of The Unknown.
Air
Self
Perfect
With Hidden Powers Of Unknown Extent Apparently At His Disposal, Curwen Was Not A Man Who Could Safely Be Warned To Leave Town.
Men
Towns
But Are Not The Dreams Of Poets And The Tales Of Travellers Notoriously False?
Dream
Poet
Tales
Humour Is But The Faint Terrestrial Echo Of The Hideous Laughter Of The Blind Mad Gods That Squat Leeringly And Sardonically In Caverns Beyond The Milky Way. It Is A Hollow Thing, Sweet On The Outside, But Filled With The Pathos Of Fruitless Aspiration.
Sweet
Laughter
Echoes
I Could Not Help Feeling That They Were Evil Things-- Mountains Of Madness Whose Farther Slopes Looked Out Over Some Accursed Ultimate Abyss. That Seething , Half-luminous Cloud-background Held Ineffable Suggestions Of A Vague, Ethereal Beyondness Far More Than Terrestrially Spatial; And Gave Appalling Reminders Of The Utter Remoteness, Separateness, Desolation, And Aeon-long Death Of This Untrodden And Unfathomed Austral World.
Clouds
Evil
Long
Searchers After Horror Haunt Strange, Far Places.
Strange Places
Strange
Horror
Science, Already Oppressive With Its Shocking Revelations, Will Perhaps Be The Ultimate Exterminator Of Our Human Species - If Separate Species We Be - For Its Reserve Of Unguessed Horrors Could Never Be Borne By Mortal Brains If Loossed Upon The World.
Brain
World
Horror
To The Scientist There Is The Joy In Pursuing Truth Which Nearly Counteracts The Depressing Revelations Of Truth.
Depressing
Joy
Scientist
The Most Merciful Thing In The World, I Think, Is The Inability Of The Human Mind To Correlate All Its Contents... 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.
Positive
Ignorance
Knowledge
Every Limited Mind Demands A Certain Freedom Of Expression, And The Man Who Cannot Express Himself Satisfactorily Without The Stimulation Derived From The Spirited Mode Of Two Centuries Ago Should Certainly Be Permitted To Follow Without Undue Restraint A Practice So Harmless, So Free From Essential Error, And So Sanctioned By Precedent, As That Of Employing In His Poetical Compositions The Smooth And Inoffensive Allowable Rhyme.
Men
Errors
Expression
Life Has Never Interested Me So Much As The Escape From Life.
Aptitude
Something Like Fear Chilled Me As I Sat There In The Small Hours Alone-i Say Alone, For One Who Sits By A Sleeper Is Indeed Alone; Perhaps More Alone Than He Can Realise.
Hours
Sat
Realising
Someday Our Piecing Together Of Knowledge Will Open Up Such Terrifying Vistas We Shall Either Go Mad Or Flee Into The Safety Of A New Dark Age.
Dark
Safety
Mad
The Dog Is A Peasant And The Cat Is A Gentleman.
Dog
Cat
Gentleman
I Am Writing This Under An Appreciable Mental Strain, Since By Tonight I Shall Be No More. Penniless, And At The End Of My Supply Of The Drug Which Alone Makes Life Endurable, I Can Bear The Torture No Longer; And Shall Cast Myself From This Garret Window Into The Squalid Street Below.
Writing
Drug
Tonight
I Am Providence, And Providence Is Myself - Together, Indissolubly As One, We Stand Thro' The Ages; A Fixt Monument Set Aeternally In The Shadow Of Durfee's Ice-clad Peak!
Ice
Shadow
Age
I Was Nearly Unnerved At My Proximity To A Nameless Thing At The Bottom Of A Pit.
Fear
Pits
Proximity
It Is Absolutely Necessary, For The Peace And Safety Of Mankind, That Some Of Earth's Dark, Dead Corners And Unplumbed Depths Be Left Alone; Lest Sleeping Abnormalities Wake To Resurgent Life, And Blasphemously Surviving Nightmares Squirm And Splash Out Of Their Black Lairs To Newer And Wider Conquests.
Sleep
Dark
Safety
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!
Doors
Hands
Body
Mid-summer ... When The Alchemy Of Nature Transmutes The Sylvan Landscape To One Vivid And Almost Homogeneous Mass Of Green; When The Senses Are Well-nigh Intoxicated With The Surging Seas Of Moist Verdure And The Subtly Indefinable Odours Of The Soil And The Vegetation. In Such Surroundings The Mind Loses Its Perspective; Time And Space Become Trivial And Unreal, And Echoes Of A Forgotten Prehistoric Past Beat Insistently Upon The Enthralled Consciousness.
Summer
Nature
Past
That Which We Call Substance And Reality Is Shadow And Illusion, And That Which We Call Shadow And Illusion Is Substance And Reality.
Reality
Shadow
Substance
I Know Always That I Am An Outsider; A Stranger In This Century And Among Those Who Are Still Men.
Men
Unyielding
Outsiders
Of What Use Is It To Please The Herd? They Are Simply Coarse Animals - For All That Is Admirable In Man Is The Artificial Product Of Special Breeding.
Animal
Men
Special
Man's Relations To Man Do Not Captivate My Fancy. It Is Man's Relation To The Cosmos--to The Unknown--which Alone Arouses In Me The Spark Of Creative Imagination.
Men
Imagination
Creative
Who Knows The End? What Has Risen May Sink, And What Has Sunk May Rise.
May
Ends
Risen
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.
Fields
Aptitude
Composition
I Should Describe Mine Own Nature As Tripartite, My Interests Consisting Of Three Parallel And Dissociated Groups - (a) Love Of The Strange And Fantastic. (b) Love Of The Abstract Truth And Of Scientific Logick. (c) Love Of The Ancient And The Permanent. Sundry Combinations Of These Three Strains Will Probably Account For All My Odd Tastes And Eccentricities.
Groups
Three
Taste
West Of Arkham The Hills Rise Wild, And There Are Valleys With Deep Woods That No Axe Has Ever Cut.
Cutting
Valleys
Woods
It Is Because The Cosmos Is Meaningless That We Must Secure Our Individual Illusions Of Values, Direction, And Interest By Upholding The Artificial Streams Which Give Us Such Worlds Of Salutary Illusion. That Is - Since Nothing Means Anything In Itself, We Must Preserve The Proximate And Arbitrary Background Which Makes Things Around Us Seem As If They Did Mean Something.
Mean
Giving
Cosmos
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.
Real
Emotional
Order
I Have Never Been Able To Soothe Myself With The Sugary Delusions Of Religion; For These Things Stand Convicted Of The Utmost Absurdity In Light Of Modern Scientific Knowledge.
Light
Able
Modern
The Only Saving Grace Of The Present Is That It's Too Damned Stupid To Question The Past Very Closely.
Stupid
Past
Grace
I Do Not Regard The Rise Of Woman As A Bad Sign. Rather Do I Fancy That Her Traditional Subordination Was Itself An Artificial And Undesirable Condition Based On Oriental Influences. Our Virile Teutonic Ancestors Did Not Think Their Wives Unworthy To Follow Them Into Battle, Or Scorn To Dream Of Winged Valkyries Bearing Them To Valhalla.
Dream
Women
Thinking
I Fear My Enthusiasm Flags When Real Work Is Demanded Of Me.
Real
Flags
Enthusiasm
In My Dreams I Found A Little Of The Beauty I Had Vainly Sought In Life, And Wandered Through Old Gardens And Enchanted Woods.
Dream
Garden
Littles
There Are Horrors Beyond Life's Edge That We Do Not Suspect, And Once In A While Man's Evil Prying Calls Them Just Within Our Range.
Men
Evil
Horror
You See Them? You See The Things That Float And Flop About You And Through You Ever Moment Of Your Life? You See The Creatures That Form What Men Call The Pure Air And The Blue Sky? Have I Not Succeeded In Breaking Down The Barrier; Have I Not Shown You Worlds That No Other Living Men Have Seen?
Men
Air
Blue
The One Test Of The Really Weird (story) Is Simply This--whether Or Not There Be Excited In The Reader A Profound Sense Of Dread, And Of Contact With Unknown Spheres And Powers; A Subtle Attitude Of Awed Listening, As If For The Beating Of Black Wings Or The Scratching Of Outside Shapes And Entities On The Known Universe's Utmost Rim.
Attitude
Wings
Profound
Zoologists Seem To Consider The Cerebration Of Cats And Dogs About 50-50 -- But My Respect Always Goes To The Cool, Sure, Impersonal, Delicately Poised Feline Who Minds His Business And Never Slobbers.
Dog
Cat
Mind
There Were Nameless Horrors Abroad; And No Matter How Little One Might Be Able To Get At Them, One Ought Tp Stand Prepared For Any Sort Of Action At Any Time.
Littles
Might
Matter
In Theory I Am An Agnostic, But Pending The Appearance Of Rational Evidence I Must Be Classed, Practically And Provisionally, As An Atheist. The Chance's Of Theism's Truth Being To My Mind So Microscopically Small, I Would Be A Pedant And A Hypocrite To Call Myself Anything Else.
Atheist
Hypocrite
Mind
Behold Great Whitman, Whose Licentious Line Delights The Rake, And Warms The Souls Of Swine; Whose Fever'd Fancy Shuns The Measur'd Pace, And Copies Ovid's Filth Without His Grace. In His Rough Brain A Genius Might Have Grown, Had He Not Sought To Play The Brute Alone; But Void Of Shame, He Let His Wit Run Wild, And Liv'd And Wrote As Adam's Bestial Child.
Running
Children
Play
Pleasure To Me Is Wonder—the Unexplored, The Unexpected, The Thing That Is Hidden And The Changeless Thing That Lurks Behind Superficial Mutability.
Inspirational
Life
Unexpected
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.
Life
Religion
Trying
Nothing Really Known Can Continue To Be Acutely Fascinating.
Fascinating
Known
Wise Men Have Interpreted Dreams, And The Gods Have Laughed.
Wise
Dream
Men
Through The Ghoul-guarded Gateways Of Slumber, Past The Wan-mooned Abysses Of Night, I Have Lived O'er My Lives Without Number, I Have Sounded All Things With My Sight.
Past
Night
Ghouls
Men Of Broader Intellect Know That There Is No Sharp Distinction Betwixt The Real And The Unreal
Real
Men
Distinction
I Expect Nothing Of Man, And Disown The Race. The Only Folly Is Expecting What Is Never Attained; Man Is Most Contemptible When Compared With His Own Pretensions. It Is Better To Laugh At Man From Outside The Universe, Than To Weep For Him Within.
Men
Race
Laughing
There Now Ensued A Series Of Incidents Which Transported Me To The Opposite Extremes Of Ecstasy And Horror; Incidents Which I Tremble To Recall And Dare Not Seek To Interpret.
Opposites
Entrepreneur
Horror
Man Is An Essentially Superstitious And Fearful Animal. Take Away The Herd's Christian Gods And Saints And They Will Without Failing Come To Worship...something Else.
Christian
Animal
Men
Incurable Lover Of The Grotesque
Lovers
Grotesque
To Be Bitter Is To Attribute Intent And Personality To The Formless, Infinite, Unchanging And Unchangeable Void. We Drift On A Chartless, Resistless Sea. Let Us Sing When We Can, And Forget The Rest.
Letting Go
Sea
Personality
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.
Dream
Memories
Real
Truly, There Are Terrible Primal Arcana Of Earth Which Had Better Be Left Unknown And Unevoked; Dread Secrets Which Have Nothing To Do With Man, And Which Man May Learn Only In Exchange For Peace And Sanity; Cryptic Truths Which Make The Knower Evermore An Alien Among His Kind, And Cause Him To Walk Alone On Earth.
Men
Secret
Earth
I Felt Myself On The Edge Of The World; Peering Over The Rim Into A Fathomless Chaos Of Eternal Night.
Night
World
Chaos
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.
Atheist
Psychosis
Atheism
Nyarlathotep . . . The Crawling Chaos . . . I Am The Last . . . I Will Tell The Audient Void. . . .
Void
Lasts
Chaos
To Me There Is Nothing More Fraught With Mystery & Terror Than A Remote Massachusetts Farmhouse Against A Lonely Hill. Where Else Could An Outbreak Like The Salem Witchcraft Have Occurred?
Lonely
Massachusetts
Mystery
I Have Looked Upon All The Universe Has To Hold Of Horror,and Even The Skies Of Spring And Flowers Of Summer Must Ever Afterward Be Poison To Me.
Summer
Spring
Flower
But More Wonderful Than The Lore Of Old Men And The Lore Of Books Is The Secret Lore Of Ocean.
Ocean
Book
Men
It Is The Night-black Massachusetts Legendry Which Packs The Really Macabre "kick". Here Is Material For A Really Profound Study In Group-neuroticism; For Certainly, No One Can Deny The Existence Of A Profoundly Morbid Streak In The Puritan Imagination.
Night
Profound
Imagination
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.
Dream
Real
Differences
Though Not A Participant In The Business Of Life; I Am, Like The Character Of Addison And Steele, An Impartial (or More Or Less Impartial) Spectator, Who Finds Not A Little Recreation In Watching The Antics Of Those Strange And Puny Puppets Called Men.
Life
Character
Men
Now All My Tales Are Based On The Fundemental Premise That Common Human Laws And Interests And Emotions Have No Validity Or Significance In The Vast Cosmos-at-large.... To Achieve The Essence Of Real Externality, Whether Of Time Or Space Or Dimension, One Must Forget That Such Things As Organic Life, Good And Evil, Love And Hate, And All Such Local Attributes Of A Negligible And Temporary Race Called Mankind, Have Any Existence At All.
Good Life
Hate
Real
It Is Better To Laugh At Man From Outside The Universe, Than To Weep For Him Within.
Men
Laughing
Universe
The Appeal Of The Spectrally Macabre Is Generally Narrow Because It Demands From The Reader A Certain Degree Of Imagination And A Capacity For Detachment From Every-day Life. Relatively Few Are Free Enough From The Spell Of The Daily Routine To Respond To Rappings From Outside, And Tales Of Ordinary Feelings And Events, Or Of Common Sentimental Distortions Of Such Feelings And Events, Will Always Take First Place In The Taste Of The Majority; Rightly, Perhaps, Since Of Course These Ordinary Matters Make Up The Greater Part Of Human Experience.
Rap
Imagination
Feelings
Since All Motives At Bottom Are Selfish And Ignoble, We May Judge Acts And Qualities Only Be Their Effects.
Selfish
Judging
Quality
From Even The Greatest Of Horrors Irony Is Seldom Absent.
Irony
Horror
Absent
Time, Space, And Natural Law Hold For Me Suggestions Of Intolerable Bondage, And I Can Form No Picture Of Emotional Satisfaction Which Does Not Involve Their Defeat - Especially The Defeat Of Time, So That One May Merge Oneself With The Whole Historic Stream And Be Wholly Emancipated From The Transient And The Ephemeral.
Emotional
Law
Space
A Page Of Addison Or Of Irving Will Teach More Of Style Than A Whole Manual Of Rules, Whilst A Story Of Poe's Will Impress Upon The Mind A More Vivid Notion Of Powerful And Correct Description And Narration Than Will Ten Dry Chapters Of A Bulky Textbook.
Powerful
Writing
Style
All Great Humorists Are Sad... I Cannot Help Seeing Beyond The Tinsel Of Humour, And Recognising The Pitiful Basis Of Jest - The World Is Indeed Comic, But The Joke Is On Mankind.
World
Helping
Comic
The Appeal Of The Spectrally Macabre Is Generally Narrow Because It Demands From The Reader A Certain Degree Of Imagination And A Capacity For Detachment From Everyday Life.
Imagination
Everyday
Degrees
Ocean Is More Ancient Than The Mountains, And Freighted With The Memories And The Dreams Of Time.
Dream
Memories
Ocean
Our Means Of Receiving Impressions Are Absurdly Few, And Our Notions Of Surrounding Objects Infinitely Narrow. We See Things Only As We Are Constructed To See Them, And Can Gain No Idea Of Their Absolute Nature. With Five Feeble Senses We Pretend To Comprehend The Boundlessly Complex Cosmos.
Mean
Ideas
Receiving
That's Because Only A Real Artist Knows The Actual Anatomy Of The Terrible Or The Physiology Of Fear - The Exact Sort Of Lines And Proportions That Connect Up With Latent Instincts Or Hereditary Memories Of Fright, And The Proper Colour Contrasts And Lighting Effects To Stir The Dormant Sense Of Strangeness.
Memories
Real
Artist
When The Last Days Were Upon Me, And The Ugly Trifles Of Existence Began To Drive Me To Madness Like The Small Drops Of Water Torturers Let Fall Ceaselessly Upon One Spot Of Their Victim's Body, I Loved The Irradiate Refuge Of Sleep. In My Dreams I Found A Little Of The Beauty I Had Vainly Sought In Life, And Wandered Through Old Gardens And Enchanted Woods.
Dream
Fall
Sleep
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.
Peers
Hints
Sometimes
The Oldest And Strongest Emotion Of Mankind Is Fear, And The Oldest And Strongest Kind Of Fear Is Fear Of The Unknown
Fear
Halloween
Scary
No New Horror Can Be More Terrible Than The Daily Torture Of The Commonplace.
Horror
Torture
Terrible
Blue, Green, Grey, White, Or Black; Smooth, Ruffled, Or Mountainous; That Ocean Is Not Silent.
Ocean
Blue
White
As Human Beings, Our Only Sensible Scale Of Values Is One Based On Lessening The Agony Of Existence.
Agony
Scales
Existence
There Are Not Many Persons Who Know What Wonders Are Opened To Them In The Stories And Visions Of Their Youth; For When As Children We Listen And Dream, We Think But Half-formed Thoughts, And When As Men We Try To Remember, We Are Dulled And Prosaic With The Poison Of Life.
Dream
Children
Men
Some Of Us Awake In The Night With Strange Phantasms Of Enchanted Hills And Gardens, Of Fountains That Sing In The Sun, Of Golden Cliffs Overhanging Murmuring Seas, Of Plains That Stretch Down To Sleeping Cities Of Bronze Andstone, And Of Shadowy Companies Of Heroes That Ride Caparisoned White Horsesalong The Edges Of Thick Forests, And Then We Know That We Have Looked Backthrough The Ivory Gates Into That World Of Wonder That Was Ours, Before We Were Wise And Unhappy.
Wise
Dream
Hero
The Moon Is Dark, And The Gods Dance In The Night; There Is Terror In The Sky, For Upon The Moon Hath Sunk An Eclipse Foretold In No Books Of Men Or Of Earth's Gods.
Book
Dark
Moon
I Have Harnessed The Shadows That Stride From World To World To Sow Death And Madness.
Shadow
World
Madness
Religion As A Vital Issue Is Dead Except On Paper, And Whatever Beauty-baiting The Future May Witness Will Be The Work Of Greed And Trade, And Not Of Honest Cosmos-facing.
Issues
Greed
Cosmos
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.
Children
Feet
Mind
Rome Was So Mighty That It Could Not Fall. It Had To Vanish In A Cloud, Like So Many Of The Mythical Heros Of Antiquity, And To Receive Its Apotheosis Among The Stars Before Men Became Fully Aware That It Had Vanished From The Earth!
Stars
Fall
Hero
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