“Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and whatever else that—with a smattering of emotive images and strains of maudlin music—can move the average citizen to tears or violence, the pessimist is invisible in both history books and 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 will get better. For pessimists, there is no amount of happiness—should such a thing as happiness even obtain… — 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
“The lessons in measurement of cloacal forces. Time as a flow of sewage. The excrement of space, scatology of creation. The voiding of the… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we… — 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, nothing would… — Thomas Ligotti Copy Share Image
