Thomas Ligotti Quotes

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

Look at your body— A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. —The Dhammapada

Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone.

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

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

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

Officially there are no fates worse than death. Unofficially, there is a profusion of such fates. For some people, just living with the thought that they will die is a fate worse than death itself.

Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.

Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

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.

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

And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people.

We live in a permanent state of bad faith, a mutual representation of ourselves to one another for the sake of remaining sane and following our biological imperative to continue as a species.

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.

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

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

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

Windows are the eyes of the soulless

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

My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics.

Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it—freedom, not reason—to pursue his plans for the future.

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

And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.

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

Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.

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

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

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.

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

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

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

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