Thomas Ligotti Quotes

33 quotes in 790 categories

• As for procreation, no one in his right mind would say that it is the only activity devoid of a praiseworthy incentive. Those who reproduce,…
• 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…
• Nature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make…
• But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a compromise with being,…
• Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.
• 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…
• And the worst possible thing we could know — worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms — is that we are…
• 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.…
• While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty…
• Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.
• My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics.
• Windows are the eyes of the soulless
• Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.
• My imagination? No, I don't think it's VIVID at all. On the contrary, it's not nearly potent enough. My poor imaginative faculties have always needed...extentions.…
• 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…
• The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight…

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