Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises.

The process of delving into the black abyss is to me the keenest form of fascination.

I never ask a man what his business is, for it never interests me. What I ask him about are his thoughts and dreams.

Vigorous let us be in attaining our ends, and mild in our method of attainment.

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.

I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me.

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