Top 100 Ligotti Quotes
#1. Thomas Ligotti is an absolute master of supernatural horror and weird fiction, and a true original. He pursues his unique vision with admirable honesty and rigorousness and conveys it in prose as powerfully evocative as any writer in the field. I'd say he might just be a genius.
Ramsey Campbell
#2. And if we're talking about hard-boiled detectives, too, what could be more hardboiled than the worldview of Ligotti or Cioran? They make the grittiest of crime writers seem like dilettantes. Next to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, Mickey Spillane seems about as hard-boiled as bubble gum.
Nic Pizzolatto
#3. When the world uncovers some dark disguise,
Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.
Thomas Ligotti
#4. The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.
Thomas Ligotti
#6. Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think - and nothing else.
Thomas Ligotti
#7. People get the biggest kick out of seeing the features of their faces plastered onto one head.
Thomas Ligotti
#8. There are enough fatalities of a mundane sort. Find a quiet place and wait for one of them to carry you off.
Thomas Ligotti
#9. The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including "everything happens for a reason," "the show must go on," "accept the things you cannot change," and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins up.
Thomas Ligotti
#10. After all, is it not wondrous that we are allowed to be both witnesses and victims of the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue? And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us.
Thomas Ligotti
#11. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#12. Horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And ultimately, we must face up to it: Horror is more real than we are.
Thomas Ligotti
#13. Personal well-being serves solely to excavate within your soul a chasm which waits to be filled by a landslide of dread, an empty mold whose peculiar dimensions will one day manufacture the shape of your unique terror
Thomas Ligotti
#14. The knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.
Thomas Ligotti
#15. From them I had nothing to learn - one cannot cease to know what one does know.
Thomas Ligotti
#16. What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?
Thomas Ligotti
#17. This whole city is most certainly a pitiful corpse, while the neighborhood outside the walls of this bar has the distinction of being the withering heart of the deceased. And I am a devoted student of its anatomy - a pathologist, after a fashion, with an eye for necroses that others overlook.
Thomas Ligotti
#18. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#19. There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection
Thomas Ligotti
#20. But stories, even very nasty ones, are traditionally considered more satisfying than reality - which, as we all know, is a grossly overrated affair.
Thomas Ligotti
#21. All that was left to us was to wonder: who knows all that is innate to this world, or to any other? Why should there not be something buried deep within appearances, something that wears a mask to hide itself behind the visibility of nature?
Thomas Ligotti
#22. Even if this is only nonsense and dreams, I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this moment, when this pain is taking over my mind and my self. Pretty soon none of this will make any difference.
Thomas Ligotti
#23. And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them.
Thomas Ligotti
#24. The pessimist's credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.
Thomas Ligotti
#25. The logic of supernatural horror [is] a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle states: "Existence equals nightmare." Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure..
Thomas Ligotti
#26. He said to me, 'The book has found its reader,' and what could I do but agree with him?
Thomas Ligotti
#27. We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe.
Thomas Ligotti
#28. For much of that day I had been secluded in my room, intently pursuing a typical activity of my early life and in the process badly ravaging what previously had been a well-made bed.
Thomas Ligotti
#29. But though the stars were spread across a great reaching blackness, the streets below were bathed in a stale gray dimness which suggested neither night nor day nor any natural phase between them.
Thomas Ligotti
#30. 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
Thomas Ligotti
#31. And we will persist in chasing the impossible until we are no more.
Thomas Ligotti
#32. If things are not what they seem - and we are forever reminded that this is the case - then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing.
Thomas Ligotti
#33. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#34. If you can't say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.
Thomas Ligotti
#35. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#36. To be conscious is inevitably to be a hypocrite. We can stomach our own kind, or just enough of them who either prove useful to us or are not handily destructible, only by the terms of the following contract: we will eat some of the other fellow's excrement if he will eat some of ours.
Thomas Ligotti
#37. Fear, when blended with failure, distills into a deadly brew.
Thomas Ligotti
#38. There is nothing to do and there is nowhere to go
There is nothing to be and there is no-one to know
Thomas Ligotti
#39. In plain language, we cannot live except as self-deceivers who must lie to ourselves about ourselves, as well as about our unwinnable situation in this world.
Thomas Ligotti
#40. Those who suffer intolerably learn to hide their afflictions, both necessary and unnecessary, because the world does not run on pain time but on happy time, whether or not that happiness is honestly felt or a mask for the blackest despondency.
Thomas Ligotti
#41. I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror.
Thomas Ligotti
#43. I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written in embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble race is mine.
Thomas Ligotti
#44. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places - a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, "I, too, am here." However,
Thomas Ligotti
#45. No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.
Thomas Ligotti
#46. The human phenomenon is but the sum
Of densely coiled layers of illusion
Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity
That there are persons of any kind
When all there can be is mindless mirrors
Laughing and screaming as they parade about
in an endless dream
Thomas Ligotti
#47. Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture - one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce - rather than an articulated body of thought.
Thomas Ligotti
#48. For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.
Thomas Ligotti
#50. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings.
Thomas Ligotti
#51. What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.
Thomas Ligotti
#52. many societies, of course, ours was founded on fearful superstition, and this is always reason enough for any kind of behavior. She
Thomas Ligotti
#53. As we should know by now, it is as easy to make fun of religious or scientific visionaries as it is to idolize them. Which attitude is adopted depends on whether or not they tell you what you want to hear.
Thomas Ligotti
#54. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#55. Rigorously considered, our only natural birthright is to die.
Thomas Ligotti
#56. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#57. Violence without violation is only a noise heard by no one, the most horrendous sound in the universe.
Thomas Ligotti
#59. It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.
Thomas Ligotti
#60. An old dream with a shiny new veneer. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and antiquated hysteria.
("The Chymist")
Thomas Ligotti
#61. Every milestone in the history of the company, even when forecast with heaps of hoopla, was ultimately played out according to some secret timeline of geologic tedium, so that it was drained of all interest and drama well before it took place and afterward went all but unnoticed.
Thomas Ligotti
#62. We had become a race of eccentrics and openly declared an array of singular whims and suspicions, at least while daylight allowed this audacity.
Thomas Ligotti
#63. To wail adamantly that a god exists is to kill that god or turn it into a plastic idol. To say that a god might exist is to vivify it with the meaning of mystery.
Thomas Ligotti
#65. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#66. Why should there be something rather than nothing?
Thomas Ligotti
#67. The voice of madness, for instance, is barely a whisper in the babbling history of art because its realities are themselves too maddening to speak of for very long - and those of the Teatro have no voice at all, given their imponderably grotesque nature.
Thomas Ligotti
#68. Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.
Thomas Ligotti
#69. Every story needs to be told in just the right way.
Thomas Ligotti
#70. Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.
Thomas Ligotti
#71. The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the self. The whole filthy integration of things and the nocturnal product . . . drowning in the pools of night.
Thomas Ligotti
#72. God was long gone before Nietzsche made his death certificate into a slogan, but no one
has yet written the obituary of the Devil.
Thomas Ligotti
#73. Paradoxically, it is the uncommon event that may best demonstrate the common predicament of our race.
Thomas Ligotti
#74. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#75. Only a cynic can create horror - for behind every masterpiece of the sort must reside a driving demonic force that despises the human race and its illusions, and longs to pull them to pieces and mock them.
Thomas Ligotti
#76. Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.
Thomas Ligotti
#77. The embodiment of his mystic precepts, he appeared at any given moment to be on the verge of an amazing disintegration, his particular complex of atoms ready to go shooting off into the great void like a burst of fireworks.
Thomas Ligotti
#78. Now I am a vagabond of the universe, a drifter among spaces where the madness of things has no limits.
Thomas Ligotti
#79. My point,' I said, 'is that there's hell in every handshake, never mind an outright and humiliating insult.
Thomas Ligotti
#80. Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life's rattle and hum.
Thomas Ligotti
#81. Survival is a two-way street. Once we settle ourselves off-world, we can blow up this planet from outer space. It's the only way to be sure its stench will not follow us. Let
Thomas Ligotti
#82. Schopenhauer's Will-to-live, commendable as it may seem as a hypothesis, is too overwrought in the proving to be anything more than another intellectual labyrinth for specialists in perplexity. Comparatively, Zapffe's principles are non-technical and could never arouse the passion of professors
Thomas Ligotti
#83. All things considered, the happiest epitaph to have etched on one's headstone is this: 'He never knew what hit him'.
Thomas Ligotti
#84. For the time being, it need only be said that the philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness - parent of all horrors.
Thomas Ligotti
#85. It's strange how you're sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.
Thomas Ligotti
#86. Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.
Thomas Ligotti
#87. One day it would be over for all, that terrible dream of everlasting changes that held us to a place that never should have been if its greatest intention led only to wallowing in the muck of eternity.
Thomas Ligotti
#88. Two tiny corpses, one male and the other female, rattle around that enormous closet in my bedroom. Though deceased, still they are quick enough to hide themselves whenever I need to enter the closet to retrieve something.
Thomas Ligotti
#89. After all, many people came here for vaguely therapeutic reasons, believing there were medicines dispensed by the very mood of the town's quaint streets and its sea-licked shores.
Thomas Ligotti
#90. If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.
Thomas Ligotti
#91. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and out-of-date distractions.
Thomas Ligotti
#92. The last of us could be the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the reality that we are just a mob always in the market for new recruits.
Thomas Ligotti
#93. Ultimately, all diseases are magical diseases ...
("Gas Station Carnival")
Thomas Ligotti
#94. The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community.
Thomas Ligotti
#95. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#96. What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next.
Thomas Ligotti
#97. 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.
Thomas Ligotti
#98. We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.
Thomas Ligotti
#99. I felt the kind of acute anticipation that a child might experience at a carnival, where each lurid attraction incites fantastic speculations, while unexpected desires arise for something which has no specific qualities in the imagination yet seems to be only a few steps away.
Thomas Ligotti
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