His madness held no affinity to any sort recorded in even the latest and most exhaustive of treatises, and was conjoined to a mental force which would have made him a genius or a leader had it not been twisted into strange and grotesque forms.

seething vortex of time

Snatches of what I read and wrote would linger in my memory. There were horrible annals of other worlds and other universes, and of stirrings of formless life outside of all universes

clinging pathetically to the cold planet and burrowing to its horror-filled core, before the utter end.

appalled at the measureless age of the fragments

fitted darkly into certain Papuan and Polynesian legends of infinite antiquity

The condition and scattering of the blocks told mutely of vertiginous cycles of time and geologic upheavals of cosmic savagery.

uttermost horrors of the aeon-old legendry

The moon, slightly past full, shone from a clear sky, and drenched the ancient sands with a white, leprous radiance which seemed to me somehow infinitely evil.

with the bloated, fungoid moon sinking in the west

how preserved through aeons of geologic convulsion I could not then and cannot now even attempt to guess.

gently bred families of the town

could not escape the sensation of being watched from ambush on every hand by sly, staring eyes that never shut.

and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds--perhaps from regions beyond life--trembling on the very brink of audibility.

little garden oasis of village-like antiquity where huge, friendly cats sunned themselves atop a convenient shed.

Better it be left alone for the years to topple, lest things be stirred that ought to rest forevrr in the black abyss

It clearly belonged to some settled technique of infinite maturity and perfection, yet that technique was utterly remote from any--Eastern or Western, ancient or modern--which I had ever heard of or seen exemplified. It was as if the workmanship were that of another planet.

intricate arabesques roused into a kind of ophidian animation.

never was an organic brain nearer to utter annihilation in the chaos that transcends form and force and symmetry.

away outside the galaxy and possibly beyond the last curved rim of space.

It was like the drone of some loathsome, gigantic insect ponderously shaped into the articulate speech of an alien species

In time the ruts of custom and economic interest became so deeply cut in approved places that there was no longer any reason for going outside them, and the haunted hills were left deserted by accident rather than by design

There were, too, certain caves of problematical depth in the sides of the hills; with mouths closed by boulders in a manner scarcely accidental, and with more than an average quota of the queer prints leading both toward and away from them

he fortified himself with the mass lore of cryptography

As before, the sides of the road showed a bruising indicative of the blasphemously stupendous bulk of the horror

The dogs slavered and crouched close to the feet of the fear-numbed family.

an added element of furtiveness in the clouded brain which subtly transformed him from an object to a subject of fear

fireflies come out in abnormal profusion to dance to the raucous, creepily insistent rhythms of stridently piping bull-frogs.

a seemingly limitless legion of whippoorwills that cried their endless message in repetitions timed diabolically to the wheezing gasps of the dying man

pandemoniac cachinnation which filled all the countryside

the left-hand one of which, in the Latin version, contained such monstrous threats to the peace and sanity of the world

Their arrangement was odd, and seemed to follow the symmetries of some cosmic geometry unknown to earth or the solar system

faint miasmal odour which clings about houses that have stood too long

I do not believe I would like to visit that country by night--at least not when the sinister stars are out

there was much breathless talk of new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown..

stealthy bitterness and sickishness, so that even the smallest bites induced a lasting disgust

plants of that kind ought never to sprout in a healthy world.

everywhere were those hectic and prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without a place among the known tints of earth. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but only verbs and pronouns..

great bare trees clawing up at the grey November sky with a studied malevolence

There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law.

monstrous constellation of unnatural light, like a glutted swarm of corpse-fed fireflies dancing hellish sarabands over an accursed marsh,

No traveler has ever escaped a sense of strangeness in those deep ravines, and artists shiver as they paint thick woods whose mystery is as much of the spirits as of the eye.

We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation...

form which only a diseased fancy could conceive

... dreams are older than brooding Tyre, or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon

iridescent flecks and striations resembled nothing familiar to geology or mineralogy.

miserable huddle of hut

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises heard by Legrasse's men as they ploughed on through the black morass.

In his house at R'lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming

all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.

The aperture was black with a darkness almost material.