Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .

Nyarlathotep . . . the crawling chaos . . . I am the last . . . I will tell the audient void. . . .

Who knows the end? What has risen may sink, and what has sunk may rise. Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men.

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.

The basis of all true cosmic horror is violation of the order of nature, and the profoundest violations are always the least concrete and describable.

What a man does for pay is of little significance. What he is, as a sensitive instrument responsive to the world's beauty, is everything!

I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.