Quotes from Thomas Ligotti

In a world without a destination, we cannot even break ground on our Tower of Babel, and no amount of rush and hurry on our part will change that.

reason is merely the mouthpiece of emotion.

whatever family name has been given to a case of depression, it has an objective in common with all its kind: to sabotage the network of emotions you had come to identify as the composition of yourself. It is then you discover that your "old self" is not the substantial and inviolable thing you thought it was, nor was the rest of your "old" reality.

was driven by the will to negate what one fears. No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

At times I have been rendered breathless by the impeccable chaoticism, the absolutely perfect nonsense of some spectacle taking place outside myself, or, on the other hand, some spectacle of equally senseless outrageousness taking place within me.

One by one all the regular staff stopped appearing for work, and their desks came to be occupied by new persons who always looked like fugitives from the great tribe of derelicts living in the Golden City, a shadow population that moved day and night through that yellowish haze.[...] Of course this manner of fiscal growth could not continue much longer and other measures would need to be taken if the company was truly to become a dominant force in the marketplace of this world or any other.

Lucifer's last words in heaven may have been "Non serviam," but none has served the Almighty so dutifully, since His sideshow in the clouds would never draw any customers if it were not for the main attraction of the devil's hell on earth.

The result was that Preston successfully negotiated quite a few decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty. In this state of arrested development, he defiantly lived through many a perverse adventure. And he still lives in the pages of those books I wrote about him, though I stopped writing them some years ago.

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. Bury your dead but don't leave a trace. And be sure to get on with things or we will get on without you.

Fear, when blended with failure, distills into a deadly brew.

The crimson woman has quite a few adversaries, just as she is connected with powerful allies. How can I say exactly who they are — some group specializing in art=magic, no doubt, but I can't just say, with a fatuous certainty, "Yes, it must be some particular gang of illuminati," or esoteric scientists , as so many have begun styling themselves these days.

As long as we deny a person or group the claim to be as right and as real as we are, so long may we hold this dreamlike claim for ourselves alone. And it is the duty of everyone to inculcate a sense of nothingness, an ache of being empty of substance and value, in those who are not emulations of them.

He became a seeker of crowds, but the crowds thinned and abandoned him. He became a seeker of lights, but the lights grew strange and led him into desolate places.

From them I had nothing to learn—one cannot cease to know what one does know.

she is overwhelmed by an amorphous anxiety without a specific source.

Ontologically, Mainländer's thought is delirious; metaphorically, it explains a good deal about human experience; practically, it may in time prove to be consistent with the idea of creation as a structure of creaking bones being eaten from within by a pestilent marrow.

While being alive is all right for the world's general population, some of us need to get it in writing that this is so.

And I succumbed to an ecstatic horror at this insight.

André of the graveyards—a sociable corpse.

There is nothing more futile than to consciously look for something to save you.

In its quest for a sense of meaning, humanity has given countless answers to questions that were never posed to it.

Time will take care of everyone until there are none of us to take care of.

Abbiamo bisogno di sapere che le marionette sono marionette. Ciononostante, potrebbero ancora farci paura. Perché, se osserviamo la marionetta in un certo modo, è come se ci guardassimo indietro, non come esseri umani ma come marionette. Parrebbe di essere sul punto di prendere vita. In questi momenti di lieve confusione, si manifesta un conflitto psicologico, una percezione dissonante che attraversa il nostro essere con una convulsione di orrore soprannaturale.

But what could I say to her? That I'm drawn to those old buildings and junk because (voice beginning to seethe) . . . because they take me into a world (the seething builds) . . . a world that is the exact opposite of the one (voice seething to a pitch) . . . the one I'm doomed by my own weakness and fear to live in (uncontrollable, meta-maniacal seething) . . . to live in during my weeks, my months, my years and years of work . . . work . . . work?