opening lines to a couplet

When I drew nigh the nameless city I knew it was accursed. I was travelling in a parched and terrible valley under the moon, and afar I saw it protruding uncannily above the sands as parts of a corpse may protrude from an ill-made grave. Fear spoke from the age-worn stones of this hoary survivor of the deluge, this great-grandmother of the eldest pyramid; and a viewless aura repelled me and bade me retreat from antique and sinister secrets that no man should see, and no man else had ever dared to see.

Remote in the desert of Araby lies the nameless city, crumbling and inarticulate, its low walls nearly hidden by the sands of uncounted ages. It must have been thus before the first stones of Memphis were laid, and while the bricks of Babylon were yet unbaked. There is no legend so old as to give it a name, or to recall that it was ever alive; but it is told of in whispers around campfires and muttered about by grandams in the tents of sheiks, so that all the tribes shun it without wholly knowing why. It was of this place that Abdul Alhazred the mad poet dreamed on the night before he sang his unexplainable couplet: "that is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die.". (full text of nameless city)

 

h.p.lovecraft, the nameless city.

 

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nothing, nothing, and more nothing

"Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end. To say that a mental shock was the cause of what I inferred—that last straw which sent me racing out of the lonely Akeley farmhouse and through the wild domed hills of Vermont in a commandeered motor at night—is to ignore the plainest facts of my final experience. Notwithstanding the deep extent to which I shared the information and speculations of Henry Akeley, the things I saw and heard, and the admitted vividness of the impression produced on me by these things, I cannot prove even now whether I was right or wrong in my hideous inference. For after all, Akeley’s disappearance establishes nothing. People found nothing amiss in his house despite the bullet-marks on the outside and inside. It was just as though he had walked out casually for a ramble in the hills and failed to return. There was not even a sign that a guest had been there, or that those horrible cylinders and machines had been stored in the study. That he had mortally feared the crowded green hills and endless trickle of brooks among which he had been born and reared, means nothing at all, either; for thousands are subject to just such morbid fears. Eccentricity, moreover, could easily account for his strange acts and apprehensions toward the last." ( complete e-text at the h.p.lovecraft archive. )

h. p. lovecraft, the whisperer in darkness.

 

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dagon worship

"this day a solemn feast the people hold to dagon, their sea-idol, and forbid laborious works."

john milton, samson agonistes.

" her own attitude toward shadowed innsmouth---which she had never seen---was one of disgust at a community slipping far down the cultural scale, and she assured me that rumours of devil-worship were partly justified by a peculiar secret cult which had gained force there and engulfed all the orthodox churches.

" it was called, she said, "the esoteric order of dagon" , and was undoubtedly a debased, quasi-pagan thing imported from the east a century before, at a time when the innsmouth fisheries seemed to be going barren. its persistence among a simple people was quite natural in view of the sudden and permanent return of abundantly fine fishing, ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the shadow over innsmouth.

 

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opening statement with unexplained sound

"Whether the dreams brought on the fever or the fever brought on the dreams Walter Gilman did not know. Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the mouldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meagre iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other, fainter, noises which he suspected were lurking behind them." ( full text at the lovecraft archive )

h.p.lovecraft, dreams in the witch house.

 

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preface to stellification

 

"the climax? what plain tale of science can boast of such a rhetorical effect? i have merely set down certain things appealing to me as facts, allowing you to construe them as you will. ...lest you think me a biased witness, another pen must add this final testimony, which may perhaps supply the climax you expect. i will quote the following account of the star nova persei verbatim from the pages of that eminent astronomical authority, professor garrett p. serviss: ..."

h.p.lovecraft, beyond the wall of sleep.

 

''the lectures gave me an opportunity to explore a feature of renaissance literature which has probably struck every serious student as puzzling at one time or another: namely, the extraordinary prominence of astronomical imagery. that the stars were important astrologically is at best a partial explanation, i am more concerned here with the impact of astronomical discoveries--particularly their implications for stellification, or translation to the stars.

''renaissance astronomical imagery is often seen as no more than a literary repercussion of copernicus, just as stellification is dismissed as hyperbolic flattery. but for some time i have felt sure that other factors were involved. in the renaissance, purely objective science hardly existed. ... seventeenth century culture was both religious and materialistic. far from science replacing religion, the literature of the period seems to show a great variety of negotiated reconciliations of the two. ... meanwhile, an urge to survive materially after death is squared with new scientific information, there are extreme swings of opinion, strange temporary solutions.''

alastair fowler, times purpled masquers.

 

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opening statement purring

"it is said that in ulthar, which lies beyond the river skai, no man may kill a cat; and this i can verily believe as i gaze upon him who sitteth purring before the fire. for the cat is cryptic, and close to strange things which men cannot see. he is the soul of antique aegyptus, and bearer of tales from forgotten cities in meroë and ophir. he is the kin of the jungle's lords, and heir to the secrets of hoary and sinister africa. the sphinx is his cousin, and he speaks her language; but he is more ancient than the sphinx, and remembers that which she hath forgotten."
h.p.lovecraft, the cats of ulther.

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opening statement written on brick cylinders

 

other sarnath near benares-varanasi

"there is in the land of mnar a vast still lake that is fed by no stream, and out of which no stream flows. ten thousand years ago there stood by its shore the mighty city of sarnath, but sarnath stands there no more. it is told that in the immemorial years when the world was young, before ever the men of sarnath came to the land of mnar, another city stood beside the lake; the grey stone city of ib, which was old as the lake itself, ..."

h.p.lovecraft, the doom that came to sarnath.

 

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