Thomas Ligotti Quotes

When the world uncovers some dark disguise,
Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

Now I am a vagabond of the universe, a drifter among spaces where the madness of things has no limits.

Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think - and nothing else.

For ages they had been without lives of their own. The whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation.

We think, therefore we should make everyone think what we think.

It's strange how you're sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.

Everything tears away at everything else ... forever.

And we will persist in chasing the impossible until we are no more.

The place was also slightly haunted,

Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?

All things considered, the happiest epitaph to have etched on one's headstone is this: 'He never knew what hit him'.

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.

There are enough fatalities of a mundane sort. Find a quiet place and wait for one of them to carry you off.

Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.

My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics.

I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror.

I had always been afraid.

Paradoxically, it is the uncommon event that may best demonstrate the common predicament of our race.

In a world without a destination, we cannot even break ground on our Tower of Babel, and no amount of rush and hurry on our part will change that.

From them I had nothing to learn - one cannot cease to know what one does know.

I'm trying to feel as good as I can.

Why should there be something rather than nothing?

If you can't say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.

For wherever mystery serves as a foundation, only ruins may be erected.

Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

The finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic.

fatal vehicular misadventure.

Every human activity is a tack for killing time,

Violence without violation is only a noise heard by no one, the most horrendous sound in the universe.

My point,' I said, 'is that there's hell in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.

Ultimately, all diseases are magical diseases ...
("Gas Station Carnival")

Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.

To become formally integrated into a society, one must offer it a blood sacrifice.

Windows are the eyes of the soulless

Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.

Man is a self-conscious Nothing,

We had become a race of eccentrics and openly declared an array of singular whims and suspicions, at least while daylight allowed this audacity.

God was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no one
has yet written the obituary of the Devil.

Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.

But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality - which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair.

What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?

We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell.

Fear, when blended with failure, distills into a deadly brew.

No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

We did not create an environment uncongenial to our species, nature did.

One must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise.

I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perceives being alive in the world.

If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.

We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe.

many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She

But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings.

People get the biggest kick out of seeing the features of their faces plastered onto one head.

Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.

The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.

The knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.

Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life's rattle and hum.

No more worlds like this / No more days like that

There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.

To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.

He said to me, 'The book has found its reader,' and what could I do but agree with him?

Generally speaking: Expect nothing but nightmarish obscenities to be born when human heads come together in intercourse.

What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next.

Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone.

Every story needs to be told in just the right way.

There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go
There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know

Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.

There is no nature to things,' you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.