Set a pen to a dream, and the colour drains from it. The ink with which we write seems diluted with something holding too much of reality, and we find that after all we cannot delineate the incredible...
I saw it from that hidden, silent placeWhere the old wood half shuts the meadow in.It shone through all the sunset's glories - thinAt first, but with a slowly brightening face.Night came, and that lon...
The daemon wind died down, and the bloated, fungoid moon sank reddeningly in the west.
He had read much of things as they are, and talked with too many people. Well-meaning philosophers had taught him to look into the logical relations of things, and analyse the processes which shaped h...
The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its content. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it w...
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 that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victims body, I...
The winter sunset, flaming beyond spiresAnd chimneys half-detached from this dull sphere,Opens great gates to some forgotten yearOf elder splendours and divine desires.Expectant wonders burn in those...
The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.
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. Relatively few are free en...
Down through this verdant land Carter walked at evening, and saw twilight float up from the river to the marvelous golden spires of Thran. And just at the hour of dusk he came to the southern gate, an...
Memory sometimes makes merciful deletions.
By noon Carter reached the jasper terraces of Kiran which slope down to the river's edge and bear that temple of loveliness wherein the King of Ilek-Vad comes from his far realm on the twilight sea on...
And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.
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..
Of the animals I saw, I could write volumes. All were wild; for the Great Race's mechanised culture had long since done away with domestic beasts, while food was wholly vegetable or synthetic.
When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams.
Almost nobody dances sober, unless they happen to be insane.
Whilst never actually rebuffing a visitor, he always reared such a wall of reserve that few could think of anything to say to him which would not sound inane.
Ultimate horror often paralyses memory in a merciful way.
If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!