“We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of semantics. Having no value for us except as “endness,”… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life’s rattle and hum. Without a “yes” in our hearts,… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
Human life moves only in one direction - toward disease, damage, and death. The best you can hope for is to remain… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else.” — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal existence. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next—as… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been initiated, the… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“Where is the writer,” he began, “who is unstained by any habits of the human, who is the ideal of everything alien… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
As a survival-happy species, our successes are calculated in the number of years we have extended our lives, with the reduction of… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“As a fact, we cannot give suffering precedence in either our individual or collective lives. We have to get on with things… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“What meaning our lives may seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else.… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For optimists, this… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“... nature did not make us to feel too good for too long (which would be no good for the survival of… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence. — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense. — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“How much I wanted to move into these rooms and live forever in this domain of medieval autumns and mute winters, serving… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“Our common preference as a species is for difference rather than unity. (Vive la différence. Vive la guerre.) Nobody designed us to… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“What is this life! you cry out. Only silence answers, and it is eloquent. Shining eyes open in the darkness, the eyes… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“To repeat: we can tolerate existence only if we believe—in accord with a complex of illusions, a legerdemain of impenetrable deception—that we… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“Also worthy of mention is a clique among the suicidal for whom the meaning of their act is a darker thing. Frustrated… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“God is dead,” wrote Mainländer, “and His death was the life of the world.” Once the great individuation had been accomplished, the… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“For optimists, human life never needs justification, no matter how much hurt piles up, because they can always tell themselves that things… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“From the earliest days of man there has endured the conviction that there is an order of existence which is entirely strange… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“What meaning our lives seem to have is the work of a relatively well-constituted emotional system. As consciousness gives us the sense… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“Subsequently there ensues an epoch of complex, proliferating intrigues and conspiracies among the ranks of double agents, whose agendas become so densely intertwined that… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For optimists, this fact plays… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“The worst fear of the race yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible dissolution of things. Nothing compares, even oblivion is… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those characters contending with what seems to be the work of magic… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“When you are alone in the wilderness, opinions or beliefs of any kind are dropped as the absurd accoutrements they are. But after being… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“There seems to be an inborn drive in all human beings not to live in a steady emotional state, which would suggest that such… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
Nature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
We live in a permanent state of bad faith, a mutual representation of ourselves to one another for the sake of remaining sane and… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“The darkness of the grotesque is an immortal enigma: in all legends of the dead, in all the tales of creatures of the night,… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“The dismembered limbs of dolls and puppets are strewn about everywhere. Posters, signs, billboards, and leaflets of various sorts are scattered around like playing… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
“As I drifted along with my bodiless invisibility, I felt myself more and more becoming an empty, floating shape, seeing without being seen and… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
