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At the Mountains of Madness QUOTES

At the Mountains of Madness QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

2 " Would to Heaven we had never approached them at all, but had run back at top speed out of that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again! "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

3 " What we did see—for the mists were indeed all too malignly thinned—was something altogether different, and immeasurably more hideous and detestable. It was the utter, objective embodiment of the fantastic novelist’s “thing that should not be”; "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

4 " It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth’s dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be let alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

5 " Poor Old Ones! Scientists to the last -- what had they done that we would not have done in their place? God, what intelligence and persistence! What a facing of the incredible, just as those carven kinsmen and forbears had faced things only a little less incredible! Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn -- whatever they had been, they were men! "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

6 " Still another time have I come to a place where it is very difficult to proceed. I ought to be hardened by this stage; but there are some experiences and intimations which scar too deeply to permit of healing and leave only such an added sensitiveness that memory reinspires all the original horror. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

7 " On the barren shore, and on the lofty ice barrier in the background, myriads of grotesque penguins squawked and flapped their fins; while many fat seals were visible on the water, swimming or sprawling across large cakes of slowly drifting ice. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

8 " It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and unforming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

9 " Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty thousand feet high, and in a climate deadly to habitation since a pre-human age not less than five hundred thousand years ago, there stretched nearly to the vision’s limit a tangle of orderly stone which only the desperation of mental self-defense could possibly attribute to any but a conscious and artificial cause. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

10 " What we heard was not the fabulous note of any buried blasphemy of elder earth from whose supernal toughness an age-denied polar sun had evoked a monstrous response. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

11 " I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why. It is altogether against my will that I tell my reasons for opposing this contemplated invasion of the antarctic—with its vast fossil-hunt and its wholesale boring and melting of the ancient ice-cap—and I am the more reluctant because my warning may be in vain. Doubt of the real facts, as I must reveal them, is inevitable; "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

12 " nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space—their "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

13 " If not dissuaded, they will get to the innermost nucleus of the antarctic and melt and bore till they bring up that which may end the world we know. So I must break through all reticences at last - even about that ultimate nameless thing beyond the mountains of madness. "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

14 " Comanchian "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness

15 " Habían llegado a una cueva. Tras los primeros sondeos, la arenisca había dado paso a una vena caliza comanchiense llena de diminutos fósiles de cefalópodos, corales, equinoideos y spirifera, con indicios ocasionales de esponjas silíceas y huesos de vertebrados marinos —probablemente de teleósteos, tiburones y ganoideos— "

― H.P. Lovecraft , At the Mountains of Madness