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.

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

For I have always been a seeker, a dreamer, and a ponderer on seeking and dreaming.

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

I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes.

And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished, for the small hours were rent with the screams of nightmare.

Pleasure to me is wonder—the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. To trace the remote in the immediate; the eternal in the ephemeral; the past in the present; the infinite in the finite; these are to me the springs of delight and beauty.