Quotes

Life's always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold. The earth's always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don't matter. What matters is that life is good.

You are not the first to be shocked and horrified by chess. It is a curse of the intellect. It is a game for lunatics—or else it creates them.

People are like planets—lonely little forts of mind with immense black distance barring them off from each other.

Everyone knows Newton as the great scientist. Few remember that he spent half his life muddling with alchemy, looking for the philosopher's stone. That was the pebble by the seashore he really wanted to find.

Two things will last to the end of time, at least for the tribes of Western Man, no matter how far his spaceships rove. They are sorcery and romantic love, which come to much the same thing in the end.

I'm thinking of the kind of horror—and wonder too, perhaps—that lies beyond any game, that's bigger than any game, that's fettered by no rules, conforms to no man-made theology, bows to no charms or protective rituals, that strides the world unseen and strikes without warning where it will, much the same as (though it's of a different order of existence than all of these) lightning or the plague or the enemy atom bomb. The sort of horror that the whole fabric of civilization was designed to protect us from and make us forget. The horror about which all man's learning tells us nothing.

That's what everybody's been looking for since the Year One—something a little more than sex.

There is an inescapable imperative about certain industrial developments. If there is not a safe road of advance, then a dangerous one will invariably be taken.

Believe in the game and accept its rules—or the premises of the story—and you can have the thrills or whatever it is you're after. Accept the spirit world and you can see ghosts and talk to the dear departed. Accept Heaven and you can have the hope of eternal life and the reassurance of an all-powerful god working on your side. Accept Hell and you can have devils and demons, if that's what you want. Accept—if only for story purposes—witchcraft, druidism, shamanism, magic or some modern variant and you can have werewolves, vampires, elementals. Or believe in the influence and power of a grave, an ancient house or monument, a dead religion, or an old stone with an inscription on it—and you can have inner things of the same general sort.

Laymen always accuse actors of acting. Because we can portray genuine emotion, we're supposed to be unable to feel it. It's the oldest charge made against us.

No wonder without fear, no fear without wonder—that's the rule for the cosmic weird tale and also the compensation for the pains of fear, the jewel in the toad's head.

Not "according to rule" and "something more"—those are the watchwords of the literature of supernatural dread.

Understatement is the horror writer's surest tool.

Barbarism can match civilization's every stench. Not one move in our frostbit lives but is strictured by a mad god's laws, which we call customs, and by black-handed irrationalities from which there is no escape.

The Seven Subjects of Sensational Journalism: crime, scandal, speculative science, insanity, superstitions such as numerology, monsters, and millionaires.

What is life but greed in action?

The only way to survive in civilization is to abide by its unwritten rules—far more important than its laws chiseled in stone—and break them only at peril, in deepest secrecy, and taking all precautions.

We have searched the wide world over and not found forgetfulness.

Aye, there's the bitter core of all freedom: no pay!

"Afterward" loses too many battles to "Too Late".

Legends travel on rainbow wings and sport gaudy colors, while truth plods on in sober garb.

Lord, what romantical fools men were, to overpass the known and good in order to strain and stretch after the mysterious merely unknown. Were dreams simply better than reality? Had fancy always more style?

Great conquerors live on as their enemies' devils.

Women have power over men almost as great as gods do.

Know it or not, man treads between abysses a tightrope that has neither beginning nor end.

Sometimes I wonder if our memories are as good as we think they are and if the whole past wasn't once entirely different from anything we remember, and we've forgotten that we forgot.

What was life worth, anyway, if you had to sit around remembering not to mention this, that, and the other thing because someone else might be upset?

Now is a bearable burden. What buckles the back is the added weight of the past's mistakes and the future's fears.

If you assume a big enough conspiracy, you can explain anything, including the cosmos itself.

Poets are wiser than anyone because they're the only people who have the guts to think and feel at the same time.

I abominate any organization that denies cats are people!

I think all modern cities, especially the crass, newly built, highly industrial ones, should have ghosts. They are a civilizing influence.

What was the whole literature of supernatural horror but an essay to make death itself exciting?—wonder and strangeness to life's very end.

Humans are dream-killers. They took the bubbles out of soapsuds and called it detergent. They took the moonlight out of romance and called it sex.

Science has only increased the area of the unknown. And if there is a God, her name is Mystery.

I am up to date only sporadically. I live firmly in the world of art, where reality and fantasy are one.

You've got to believe there's some sort of sense in everything that crazies say.

You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can't get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.