Quoted By:
On young Lovecraft learning about sexual intercourse
>"In the matter of the justly celebrated "facts of life" I didn't wait for oral information, but exhausted the entire subject in the medical section of the family library [...] when I was 8 years old - through Quain's Anatomy (fully illustrated & diagrammed), Dunglinson's Physiology, &c. &c. This was because of curiosity & perplexity concerning the strange reticence & embarassments of adult speech. & the oddly inexplicable allusions & situations in standard literature. The result was the very opposite of what parents generally fear - for instead of giving me an abnormal & precocious interest in sex [...] it virtual killed my interest in the subject. The whole matter was reduced to prosaic mechanism - a mechanism which I rather despised or at least thought non-glamorous because of its purely animal nature & separation from such things as intellect and beauty"
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On Lovecraft's mother attempting to make her son learn to dance
>"Susie also attempted to mould him in ways he found either irritating or repugnant. Around 1898 she tried to enrol him in a children's dancing class; Lovecraft "abhorred the thought" and, fresh from an initial study of Latin, responded with a line from Cicero: "Nemo fere saltat sobrius, nisi forte insanit!" ("Scarcely any sober person dances, unless by chance he is insane".
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On one local girl's memory of young Lovecraft
>"Howard used to go out into the fields in back of my home to study the stars. One early fall evening several of the children in the vicinity assembled to watch him from a distance. Feeling sorry for his loneliness I went up to him and asked him about his telescope and was permitted to look through it. But his language was so technical that I could not understand it and I returned to my group and left him to his lonely study of the heavens."
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