Top 120 Thomas Ligotti Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls – while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”

— Thomas Ligotti

2. “Nonexistence never hurt anyone. Existence hurts everyone.”

— Thomas Ligotti

3. “Look at your body – A painted puppet, a poor toy Of jointed parts ready to collapse, A diseased and suffering thing With a head full of false imaginings. – The Dhammapada.”

— Thomas Ligotti

4. “Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”

— Thomas Ligotti

5. “Everything is ultimately peculiar and ultimately ridiculous.”

— Thomas Ligotti

6. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

7. “Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are – hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”

— Thomas Ligotti

8. “And the worst possible thing we could know – worse than knowing of our descent from a mass of microorganisms – is that we are nobodies not somebodies, puppets not people.”

— Thomas Ligotti

9. “Windows are the eyes of the soulless.”

— Thomas Ligotti

10. “No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.”

— Thomas Ligotti

11. “And we will persist in chasing the impossible until we are no more.”

— Thomas Ligotti

12. “The human phenomenon is but the sum Of densely coiled layers of illusion Each of which winds itself on the supreme insanity That there are persons of any kind When all there can be is mindless mirrors Laughing and screaming as they parade about in an endless dream.”

— Thomas Ligotti

13. “A: There is no grand scheme of things. B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity. C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity.”

— Thomas Ligotti

14. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

15. “The only value of this world lay in its power – at certain times – to suggest another world.”

— Thomas Ligotti

16. “To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person’s humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”

— Thomas Ligotti

17. “Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.”

— Thomas Ligotti

18. “It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.”

— Thomas Ligotti

19. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

20. “The finest people, as people go, cannot help but betray a fair portion of fear and insecurity, even full-blown panic.”

— Thomas Ligotti

21. “What makes a nightmare nightmarish is the sense that something is happening that should not be. While nightmares are the most convenient reference point for this sense of the impossible, the unthinkable, as something that is actually happening, it is not restricted to our sleeping hours.”

— Thomas Ligotti

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

— Thomas Ligotti

23. “Life is hell, and the sweet still night of absolute death is the annihilation of hell.”

— Thomas Ligotti

24. “If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”

— Thomas Ligotti

25. “We are gene-copying bio-robots, living out here on a lonely planet in a cold and empty physical universe.”

— Thomas Ligotti

26. “What we do, as a conscious species, is set markers for ourselves. Once we reach one marker, we advance to the next.”

— Thomas Ligotti

27. “A misbegotten hatchling of consciousness, a birth defect of our species, imagination is often revered as a sign of vigor in our make-up. But it is really just a psychic overcompensation for our impotence as beings. Denied nature’s exemption from creativity, we are indentured servants of the imaginary until the hour of our death, when the final harassments of imagination will beset us.”

— Thomas Ligotti

28. “If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.”

— Thomas Ligotti

29. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

30. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

31. “Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and whatever else that – with a smattering of emotive images and strains of maudlin music – can move the average citizen to tears or violence, the pessimist is invisible in both history books and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, he could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause. Pessimists are indeed lackadaisical as partisans in the human drama.”

— Thomas Ligotti

32. “For the time being, it need only be said that the 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 – parent of all horrors.”

— Thomas Ligotti

33. “One day it would be over for all, that terrible dream of everlasting changes that held us to a place that never should have been if its greatest intention led only to wallowing in the muck of eternity.”

— Thomas Ligotti

34. “For us, then, life is a confidence trick we must run on ourselves, hoping we do not catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void. To end this self-deception, to free our species of the paradoxical imperative to be and not to be conscious, our backs breaking by degrees upon a wheel of lies, we must cease reproducing. Nothing less will do.”

— Thomas Ligotti

35. “My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics.”

— Thomas Ligotti

36. “But even if ego-death is regarded as the optimum model for human existence, one of liberation from ourselves, it still remains a compromise with being, a concession to the blunder of creation itself. We should be able to do better, and we can. To have our egos killed off is second-best to killing off death and all the squalid byplay that flitters around it. So let all lands be small, and grower smaller and smaller until no lands are left where any human footstep need press itself upon the earth.”

— Thomas Ligotti

37. “Life had overshot its target, blowing itself apart. A species had been armed too heavily – by spirit made almighty without, but equally a menace to its own well-being. Its weapon was like a sword without hilt or plate, a two-edged blade cleaving everything; but he who is to wield it must grasp the blade and turn one edge toward himself.”

— Thomas Ligotti

38. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

39. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

40. “Death, therefore, the most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not come, and, when death is come, we are not.”

— Thomas Ligotti

41. “Only catatonics and coma patients can persevere in a dignified withdrawal from life’s rattle and hum.”

— Thomas Ligotti

42. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

43. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

44. “Whether you think consciousness to be a benefit or a horror, this is only what you think – and nothing else.”

— Thomas Ligotti

45. “If asked to name the definitive image in Lovecraft, one might likely say its tentacles flailing from the body of a monster. For me it would be probably be puppets, manikins, and clown-like things, even though these are more often a matter of metaphor than a literal presence of a monstrous type. Nevertheless, if Lovecraft’s tentacle monsters and my puppets and so on fought each other, I think the monsters would win.”

— Thomas Ligotti

46. “The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.”

— Thomas Ligotti

47. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

48. “Best-selling horror fiction is indeed necessarily conservative because it must entertain a large number of readers. It’s like network television. I’m your local cable access station.”

— Thomas Ligotti

49. “I cannot wait to be dead. I cannot wait.”

— Thomas Ligotti

50. “Without an iota of uncertainty, humankind is and will always be unsuited to take charge of its own deliverance. The delusional will forever be with us, thereby making pain, fear, and denial of what is right in front of our face the preferred style of living and the one that will be passed on to countless generations.”

— Thomas Ligotti