Thomas Ligotti Quotes

I know in a way I never knew before that there is nowhere for me to go, nothing for me to do, and no...

From around the corner's edge a grotesque light was trickling out, the first intimations of an omino...

... whatever family name has been given to a case of depression, it has an objective in common with ...

For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any ...

Lucifer endears himself to us only as the Lord of Lies, for in this role he is most convincing as a ...

What is this life! you cry out. Only silence answers, and it is eloquent. Shining eyes open in the d...

This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whate...

Hypocrisy—in other words, the practice of lying about lying—shields us from seeing ourselves as we a...

When you are alone in the wilderness, opinions or beliefs of any kind are dropped as the absurd acco...

... nature did not make us to feel too good for too long (which would be no good for the survival of...

We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncann...

As survivors and procreators, we unravel stories that at their root are not dissimilar from the habi...

So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the un...

Solitary writers come out of nowhere and do not belong anywhere. They are not domesticated or social...

This, then, is the ultimate, that is only, consolation: simply that someone shares some of your own ...

All social orders command their members to imbibe in pipe dreams of posterity, the mirage of immorta...

We did not make ourselves, nor did we fashion a world that could not work without pain, and great pa...

A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revere...

We are only chance visitants to this jungle of blind mutations. The natural world existed when we di...

If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of...

METAPHYSICAL LECTURE 1It has been said that after undergoing certain ordeals — whether ecstatic or a...

Perhaps our judgement of the purple woman was unfair. No doubt her theories concerning the "approach...

Tapping a little bell, I leaned on the desk and turned to look at a small, traditionally decorated C...

Such ordeals always strike one with their strangeness, their digression from the normal flow of even...

And one thing we know is real: horror. It is so real, in fact, that we cannot be sure it could not e...

Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all ...

Compassion for human hurt, a humble sense of our impermanence, an absolute valuation of justice—all ...

When the world uncovers some dark disguise,Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.

The embodiment of his mystic precepts, he appeared at any given moment to be on the verge of an amaz...

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

While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire...

I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My an...

And any room that I enter may become a sideshow tent where I must take my place upon a rickety old b...

Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders o...

And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, se...

But the secrets of such a book are not perpetual. Once they are known, they become relegated to a le...

So it is that supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not...

Something statuesque is approaching her. It radiates a field of dynamic tension that grows more inte...

All of us had problems, it seemed, whose sources were untraceable, crossing over one another like th...

If human pleasure did not have both a lid and a time limit, we would not bestir ourselves to do thin...

It was an unusual sunset. Having sat behind opaque drapery all day, I had not realized that a storm ...

In supernatural horror stories, however, magical thinking is a completely different matter. Those ch...

Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates. Their ...

I have no idea how long Quisser was gone from the table. My attention became fully absorbed by the o...

An old dream with a shiny new veneer. It's fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometim...

There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of ...

We think, therefore we should make everyone think what we think.

Even if this is only nonsense and dreams, I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this m...

That night I slept badly, thrashing about in my bed, not quite asleep and not quite awake. At times ...

There was simply no peace to be had no matter where you hid yourself away. Even in a northern border...

The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human a...

The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlighte...

I'm completely indifferent to what genre I read provided that I feel sympathy with how a writer perc...

Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large num...

To Eden with me you will not leaveTo live in a cottage of crazy, crooked eaves.In your own happy hom...

No one at the factory can remember how long we’ve worked here, or how old we are, yet our pace and p...

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

When I first read Lovecraft around 1971, and even more so when I began to read about his life, I imm...

To be sane, he held, was either to be sedated by melancholy or activated by hysteria, two responses ...

In the recumbence of depression, your information-gathering system collates its intelligence and rep...

You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to d...

... the logic of supernatural horror [is] a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle stat...

Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.

All that was left to us was to wonder: who knows all that is innate to this world, or to any other? ...

The worst fear of the race yes, the world suddenly transformed into a senseless nightmare, horrible ...

No more worlds like this / No more days like that

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

Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great d...

The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.

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