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.

From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and the dreams of Time.

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

Unhappy is he to whom the memories of childhood bring only fear and sadness.

There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything.

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.