“If we knew what we are, we should do as Sir Arthur Jermyn did; and Arthur Jermyn soaked himself in oil and set first to his clothing one night.”

“Many would have disliked to live, if possessed of the peculiar features of Arthur Jermyn, but he had been a poet and a scholar and had not minded.”

“We might have known from the first that human curiosity is undying, and that the results we announced would be enough to spear others ahead on the same age-long pursuit of the unknown.”

“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that blasphemous tunnel with the greasily smooth floors and the degenerate murals aping and mocking the things they had superseded-run back, before we had seen what we did see, and before our minds were burned with something which will never let us breathe easily again!”

“The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be. Not in the spaces we know, but between them. They walk serene and primal, undimensioned and to us unseen.”

“There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while man's evil prying calls them just within our range.”

“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!”