The Call of Cthulhu and At the Mountains of Madness

heart.”
In 1921, while attending a convention of the UAPA in Boston, Lovecraft met Sonia Greene, a widowed Brooklyn milliner seven years his senior. Their brief, disastrous marriage took him to New York City for two years; his return to Providence in the spring of 1926 prompted the greatest creative outburst of his short career.

Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star spawn—whatever they had been, they were men!

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.

Perhaps we were mad—for have I not said those horrible peaks were mountains of madness?

A voice from other epochs belongs in a graveyard of other epochs.

Could one be sure of what might or might not linger, even to this day, in the lightless and unplumbed abysses of earth’s deepest waters?

Was it still down there, a stony corpse in eternal blackness?

No human eye had ever seen them, and as I studied the emotions conveyed in the carvings, I prayed that none ever might.

Whatever the old secret of interstellar travel had been, it was now definitely lost to the race.

These viscous masses were without doubt what Abdul Alhazred whispered about as the “Shoggoths” in his frightful Necronomicon, though even that mad Arab had not hinted that any existed on earth except in the dreams of those who had chewed a certain alkaloidal herb.