Tom > Tom's Quotes

“Every human activity is a tack for killing time,”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“I wanted to do things to Richard that would make the sun grow cold with horror.”
― Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror

“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

“Let's say it once and for all: Poe and Lovecraft - not to mention a Bruno Schulz or a Franz Kafka - were what the world at large would consider extremely disturbed individuals. And most people who are that disturbed are not able to create works of fiction. These and other names I could mention are people who are just on the cusp of total psychological derangement. Sometimes they cross over and fall into the province of 'outsider artists.' That's where the future development of horror fiction lies - in the next person who is almost too emotionally and psychologically damaged to live in the world but not too damaged to produce fiction.”
― Thomas Ligotti

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

“The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“So they trust in the deity of the Old Testament, an incontinent dotard who soiled Himself and the universe with his corruption, a low-budget divinity passing itself off as the genuine article. (Ask the Gnostics.) They trust in Jesus Christ, a historical cipher stitched together like Frankenstein's monster out of parts robbed from the graves of messiahs dead and buried - a savior on a stick. They trust in the virgin-pimping Allah and his Drum Major Mohammed, a prophet-come-lately who pioneered a new genus of humbuggery for an emerging market of believers that was not being adequately served by existing religious products. They trust in anything that authenticates their importance as persons, tribes, societies, and particularly as a species that will endure in this world and perhaps in an afterworld that may be uncertain in its reality and unclear in its layout, but which states their craving for values "not of this earth" - that depressing, meaningless place their consciousness must sidestep every day.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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

“There is nothing like fear to complicate one's consciousness, inducing previously unknown levels of reflection”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“Nothing belongs to us. Everything is something that is rented out. Our very heads are filled with rented ideas passed on from one generation to the next.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“My grandfather felt at home with his lunatics.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“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, The Spectral Link

“An old dream with a shiny new veneer. 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 antiquated hysteria.

("The Chymist")”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory

“Windows are the eyes of the soulless”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory

“...ultimately, all diseases are magical diseases...

("Gas Station Carnival")”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Nightmare Factory

“You see how I live: shadows and silence, leaving things as I find them because I have no reason to disturb them. But there are things that I have known, even though I never wished to know them and cannot give them a name.”
― Thomas Ligotti , Grimscribe: His Lives and Works

“The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that the customer would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all of our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product -- Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price -- Everything.”
― Thomas Ligotti, My Work is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror

“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, Noctuary

“What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

“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, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“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, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“To become formally integrated into a society, one must offer it a blood sacrifice.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“Now I am a vagabond of the universe, a drifter among spaces where the madness of things has no limits.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“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, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.”
― Thomas Ligott, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco