Quotes from Thomas Ligotti

Violence without violation is only a noise heard by no one, the most horrendous sound in the universe.

Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life's rattle and hum.

All that was left to us was to wonder: who knows all that is innate to this world, or to any other? Why should there not be something buried deep within appearances, something that wears a mask to hide itself behind the visibility of nature?

Optimism has always been an undeclared policy of human culture—one that grew out of our animal instincts to survive and reproduce—rather than an articulated body of thought.

How much I wanted to move into these rooms and live forever in this domain of medieval autumns and mute winters, serving out my sentence of life among all the visible and invisible wonders I had only dreamed about from so far away.

at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.

of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.

After all, is it not wondrous that we are allowed to be both witnesses and victims of the sepulchral pomp of wasting tissue? And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not exist without us.

It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal existence. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness.

There will come a day for each of us, and then for all of us, when the future will be done with. Until then, humanity will acclimate itself to every new horror that comes knocking as it has done from the very beginning.

Why do only a fairly minor number of individuals perish because they fail to endure the strain of living—because cognition gives them more than they can carry?" Zapffe's answer: "Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.

But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings.

Sometimes you just have to keep some distance between yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.

There are enough fatalities of a mundane sort. Find a quiet place and wait for one of them to carry you off.

For other organisms, bumbling along from here to nowhere is well managed. For us, it is a messy business and often intolerably horrific. To end all this paradox and horror [...] we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.

The divine right of kings may now be acknowledged as a fabrication, a falsified permit for prideful dementia and impulsive mayhem. The inalienable rights of certain people, on the other hand, seemingly remain current: somehow we believe they are not fabrications because hallowed documents declare they are real.

there was still some greater chaos, some deeper insanity, than one had counted on, or could ever be taken into account – wherever there was anything, there would be chaos and insanity to such a degree that one could never come to terms with it, and it was only a matter of time before your world, whatever you thought it to be, was undermined, if not completely overrun, by another world.

I showed her my cubicle of commercial artistry, and drew her attention to my latest project. "Oh, that's lovely," she said when I pointed out the drawing of a nymph with flowers in her freshly shampooed hair. "That's really nice." That "nice" remark almost spoiled my day.

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb...and find them to our liking.

It all seemed so enticing, but like every other attraction along the world's midway the greatest part of its appeal lay in those moments of anticipation. And after it was all over, the particular attraction which had once promised so much would send you on your way unrewarded, purged of your curiosity and the poorer for being so.

For much of that day I had been secluded in my room, intently pursuing a typical activity of my early life and in the process badly ravaging what previously had been a well-made bed.

For ages they had been without lives of their own. The whole of their being was open to the world and nothing divided them from the rest of creation.

Sometimes you just have to keep some distance from yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.

From where we stand, immortality and death are synonymous: a two-headed monster of semantics. Having no value for us except as "endness," they generate value backwards into life.