Quotes from Thomas Ligotti

Now I am a vagabond of the universe, a drifter among spaces where the madness of things has no limits.

People get the biggest kick out of seeing the features of their faces plastered onto one head.

Windows are the eyes of the soulless

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

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.

While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.

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.

If we must think, it should be done only in circles, outside of which lies the unthinkable.

Best to immunize your consciousness from any thoughts that are startling and dreadful so that we can all go on conspiring to survive and reproduce as paradoxical beings—puppets that can walk and talk all by themselves. At worst keep your startling and dreadful thoughts to yourself. Hearken well: "None of us wants to hear spoken the exact anxieties we keep locked up inside ourselves. Smother that urge to go spreading news of your pain and nightmares around town.

As I drifted along with my bodiless invisibility, I felt myself more and more becoming an empty, floating shape, seeing without being seen and walking without the interference of those grosser creatures who shared my world. It was not an experience completely without interest or even pleasure. The clown's shibboleth of "here we are again" took on a new meaning for me as I felt myself a novitiate of a more rarified order of harlequinry. ("The Last Feast Of The Harlequin")

My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics.

We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.

To become formally integrated into a society, one must offer it a blood sacrifice.

the knowledge that life is worthless is the flower of all human wisdom.

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.

Is the child in that old photograph really an erstwhile version of you, your little hand waving farewell? The face of that child is nothing like the face you have now. That child's face is now melding with the blackness behind you, before you, around you. The child is waving and smiling and fading as your car keeps skidding toward your abruptly curtailed future. Bye-bye.

ultimately, all diseases are magical diseases... ("Gas Station Carnival")

Our common preference as a species is for difference rather than unity. (Vive la différence. Vive la guerre.) Nobody designed us to be this way—it just happens to be how we blundered into the nightmare of being. Life preys on life, per Schopenhauer

All things considered, the happiest epitaph to have etched on one's headstone is this: 'He never knew what hit him'.

Jens Bjørneboe wrote that "he who hasn't experienced a full depression alone and over a long period of time—he is a child.

There is no nature to things,' you wrote in the book. 'There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.

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.

To Eden with me you will not leave To live in a cottage of crazy, crooked eaves. In your own happy home you take care these nights; When you let your little cat in, please turn on the lights! Something scurries behind and finds a cozy place to stare, Something sent to you from paradise, with serpents to spare: Tongues flowering; they leap out laughing, lapping. Dissapear

Everything tears away at everything else … forever.