Quotes from Thomas Ligotti

Some speculative minds have faith that we are en route to a utopia where people are not mainly absorbed in a job that is killing them or despondent because they do not have a killing job.

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

What remained lost was the revelation that nothing ever known has ended in glory; that all which ends does so in exhaustion, confusion and debris.

Children have made me nervous ever since I stopped being one of them.

Any progress towards the salvation of mankind will probably start from the bottom [the family unit] when our gods have been devalued to the status of fridge magnets or garden ornaments.

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—

Existence equals nightmare." Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure.

I realize that what I have written so far about supernatural horror stories sounds as if my goal in writing them is to demoralize and depress my readers. I assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. In my literary philosophy, if story fails to entertain readers, to captivate them with characters and incidents they never could have imagined themselves, then that story has failed.

Throughout the most innocent mornings and unclouded afternoons there endures a kind of restless pulling at appearances, an awkward or expert fussing with the facade of objects.

All supernatural horror depends on a confusion of what we believe should be and should not be. As scientists, philosophers, and spiritual figures have attested, our heads are full of illusions; things, including human things, are frequently not what they seem…No one can prove that our existence is a paradox and a horror. Everything is alright with the world.

Such are some of the non-praiseworthy incentives of those who would fertilize the future. And they are all pressures of one kind or another. These pressures build up in people throughout their lifetimes and cry to be released, just as our bowels cry to be released to avoid the discomfort of a fecal build-up. And who, if they could help it, wants the discomfort of a fecal build-up? So we make bowel movements to relieve this pressure.

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.

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.