Best quotes from At the Mountains of Madness

Tell me, Simpson, if an opportunity arose for taking a small short-cut, you wouldn't be averse to taking it, would you?

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”.

On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage - the first I had ever seen - in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

I am forced into speech because men of science have refused to follow my advice without knowing why.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I was nearly unnerved at my proximity to a nameless thing at the bottom of a pit.

Our good luck and efficiency had indeed been almost uncanny.