I could not help feeling that they were evil things -- mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss.

Maybe, just maybe, I should not have used the word "eldritch" so many times now that I think about it.

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

Sometimes I believe that this less material life is our truer life, and that our vain presence on the terraqueous globe is itself the secondary or merely virtual phenomenon.

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!

A serious adult story must be true to something in life. Since marvel tales cannot be true to the events of life, they must shift their emphasis towards something to which they can be true; namely, certain wistful or restless moods of the human spirit, wherein it seeks to weave gossamer ladders of escape from the galling tyranny of time, space, and natural law.

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.