Top 120 Thomas Ligotti Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

52. “But though the stars were spread across a great reaching blackness, the streets below were bathed in a stale gray dimness which suggested neither night nor day nor any natural phase between them.”

— Thomas Ligotti

53. “We are each either among the demoralized showing the way to a future of eternal nightmare, or we are losers celebrating our moment in hell.”

— Thomas Ligotti

54. “The last of us could be the very best of us who ever roamed the earth, the great exemplars of a humanity we used to dream of becoming before we got wise to the reality that we are just a mob always in the market for new recruits.”

— Thomas Ligotti

55. “Is there really anything behind our smiles and tears but an evolutionary slip-up?”

— Thomas Ligotti

56. “Even if this is only nonsense and dreams, I feel the need to perpetuate it all. Especially at this moment, when this pain is taking over my mind and my self. Pretty soon none of this will make any difference.”

— Thomas Ligotti

57. “It’s strange how you’re sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.”

— Thomas Ligotti

58. “We did not create an environment uncongenial to our species, nature did.”

— Thomas Ligotti

59. “Transhumanism encapsulates a long-lived error among the headliners of science: 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. That we are going nowhere is not a curable condition; that we must go nowhere at the fastest possible velocity just might be curable, though probably not. And what difference would it make to retard our progress to nowhere?”

— Thomas Ligotti

60. “The farther you progress toward a vision of our species without limiting conditions on your consciousness, the farther you drift away from what makes you a person among persons in the human community.”

— Thomas Ligotti

61. “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. Yes, it needs our imaginations and our consciousness, but it does not ask or require our consent to use them. Indeed, horror operates with complete autonomy. Generating ontological havoc, it is mephitic foam upon which our lives merely float. And, all said, we must face up to it: horror is more real than we are.”

— Thomas Ligotti

62. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

63. “Like a faint haze it floats around us. We keep company with ghosts. Their graves are marked in our minds, and they will never be disinterred from the cemeteries of our remembrance.”

— Thomas Ligotti

64. “Why should there be something rather than nothing?”

— Thomas Ligotti

65. “The world dotes on its lunatics, whether saintly or sadistic, and commemorates their careers. Psychopaths make terrific material for news agencies and movie studios; their exploits always draw a crowd. But the moment a discouraging word is spoken, some depressing knowledge, that crowd either disperses or goes on the attack. It is depression not madness that cows us, demoralization not insanity that we dread, disillusionment of the mind not its derangement that imperils our culture of hope.”

— Thomas Ligotti

66. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

67. “An individual’s demarcations as a being, not his trespass of them, create his identity and preserve his illusion of being something special and not a freak of chance, a product of blind mutations. Transcending all illusions and their emergent activities – having absolute control of what we are and not what we need to be so that we may survive the most unsavory facts of life and death – would untether us from the moorings of our self-limited selves.”

— Thomas Ligotti

68. “We had become a race of eccentrics and openly declared an array of singular whims and suspicions, at least while daylight allowed this audacity.”

— Thomas Ligotti

69. “No one in a productive society wants you to know there ways of looking at the world other than their ways, and among the effects drugs may have is that of switching a mind from the normal track. Reading the works of certain writers has a corresponding effect. When receptive individuals explore the writings of someone such as Lovecraft, they are majestically solaced to find articulations of existence countering those to which the heads around them have become habituated.”

— Thomas Ligotti

70. “While a modicum of consciousness may have had survivalist properties during an immemorial chapter of our evolution – so one theory goes – this faculty soon enough became a seditious agent working against us. As Zapffe concluded, we need to hamper our consciousness for all we are worth or it will impose upon us a too clear vision of what we do not want to see, which, as the Norwegian philosopher saw it, along with every other pessimist, is “the brotherhood of suffering between everything alive.”

— Thomas Ligotti

71. “To the regret of pessimists, our primitive ancestors could not see that theirs was not a time in which to produce children.”

— Thomas Ligotti

72. “Nature proceeds by blunders; that is its way. It is also ours. So if we have blundered by regarding consciousness as a blunder, why make a fuss over it? Our self-removal from this planet would still be a magnificent move, a feat so luminous it would bedim the sun. What do we have to lose? No evil would attend our departure from this world, and the many evils we have known would go extinct along with us. So why put off what would be the most laudable masterstroke of our existence, and the only one?”

— Thomas Ligotti

73. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

74. “If you interrupted them in the middle of an ecstatic moment, which pessimists do have, and asked if existence is basically undesirable, they would reply “Of course” before returning to their ecstasy. Why they should answer in this way is a closed book.”

— Thomas Ligotti

75. “Such ordeals always strike one with their strangeness, their digression from the normal flow of events, and often provoke a universal protest: “Why me?” Be sure that this is not a question but an outcry. The person who screams it has been instilled with an astonishing suspicion that he, in fact, has been the perfect subject for a very specific “weird,” a tailor-made fate, and that a prior engagement, in all its weirdness, was fulfilled at the appointed time and place.”

— Thomas Ligotti

76. “For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to liberate himself from the dungeon cell of his life.”

— Thomas Ligotti

77. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

78. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

79. “To salve the pains of consciousness, some people anesthetize themselves with sunny thoughts. But not everyone can follow their lead, above all not those who sneer at the sun and everything upon which it beats down. Their only respite is in the balm of bleakness. Disdainful of the solicitations of hope, they look for sanctuary in desolate places – a scattering of ruins in a barren locale or a rubble of words in a book where someone whispers in a dry voice, “I too am here.”

— Thomas Ligotti

80. “Every milestone in the history of the company, even when forecast with heaps of hoopla, was ultimately played out according to some secret timeline of geologic tedium, so that it was drained of all interest and drama well before it took place and afterward went all but unnoticed.”

— Thomas Ligotti

81. “Long exasperated by questions without answers, by answers without consequences, by truths which change nothing, we learn to become intoxicated by the mood of mystery itself, by the odor of the unknown. We are entranced by the subtle scents and wavering reflections of the unimaginable.”

— Thomas Ligotti

82. “The value of a philosopher’s thought is not in its answers – no philosopher has any that are more helpful than saying nothing at all – but in how well they speak to the prejudgments of their consumers. Such is the importance – and the nullity – of rhetoric. Ask any hard-line pessimist, but do not expect him to expect you to take his words seriously.”

— Thomas Ligotti

83. “I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror.”

— Thomas Ligotti

84. “I continued to stare at the empty seat because my sensation of a vibrant presence there was unrelieved. And in my staring I perceived that the fabric of the seat, the inner webbing of swirling fibers, had composed a pattern in the image of a face – an old woman’s face with an expression of avid malignance – floating amidst wild shocks of twisting hair.”

— Thomas Ligotti

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

— Thomas Ligotti

86. “This whole city is most certainly a pitiful corpse, while the neighborhood outside the walls of this bar has the distinction of being the withering heart of the deceased. And I am a devoted student of its anatomy – a pathologist, after a fashion, with an eye for necroses that others overlook.”

— Thomas Ligotti

87. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

88. “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?”

— Thomas Ligotti

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

— Thomas Ligotti

90. “It’s fascinating, you know, how an obsolete madness is sometimes adopted and stylized in an attempt to ghoulishly preserve it. These are the days of second-hand fantasies and out-of-date distractions.”

— Thomas Ligotti

91. “Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it – freedom, not reason – to pursue his plans for the future.”

— Thomas Ligotti

92. “The embodiment of his mystic precepts, he appeared at any given moment to be on the verge of an amazing disintegration, his particular complex of atoms ready to go shooting off into the great void like a burst of fireworks.”

— Thomas Ligotti

93. “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. It is the default condition of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would explain why at any given time there are more cannibals than philosophical pessimists.”

— Thomas Ligotti

94. “Survival is a two-way street. Once we settle ourselves off-world, we can blow up this planet from outer space. It’s the only way to be sure its stench will not follow us. Let.”

— Thomas Ligotti

95. “And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book’s page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.”

— Thomas Ligotti

96. “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.”

— Thomas Ligotti

97. “After all, many people came here for vaguely therapeutic reasons, believing there were medicines dispensed by the very mood of the town’s quaint streets and its sea-licked shores.”

— Thomas Ligotti

98. “For wherever mystery serves as a foundation, only ruins may be erected.”

— Thomas Ligotti

99. “Some heads are more haunted than others, whether they are haunted by ghosts or by gods or by creatures from outer space.”

— Thomas Ligotti

100. “I felt the kind of acute anticipation that a child might experience at a carnival, where each lurid attraction incites fantastic speculations, while unexpected desires arise for something which has no specific qualities in the imagination yet seems to be only a few steps away.”

— Thomas Ligotti