Lilou

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Lilou.


Inventing the Ren...
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Legend of Fei
Rate this book
Clear rating

 
Loading...
“I know, I know: it can be frustrating as hell. But people have an unfortunate habit of assuming they understand the reality just because they understood the analogy. You dumb down brain surgery enough for a preschooler to think he understands it, the little tyke’s liable to grab a microwave scalpel and start cutting when no one’s looking.”
Peter Watts, Echopraxia

Thomas Ligotti
“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, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.”
Peter Watts, Blindsight

Thomas Ligotti
“This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

Thomas Ligotti
“The pessimist’s credo, or one of them, is that nonexistence never hurt anyone and existence hurts everyone.”
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

year in books
Cecelia
85 books | 48 friends

Ksenia
2,172 books | 52 friends

Chohan
1 book | 2 friends

William R.
318 books | 1 friend

Susan
59 books | 42 friends


Sense and Sensibility by Jane AustenTo Kill a Mockingbird by Harper LeeThe Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. TolkienLord of the Flies by William GoldingThe Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Classics Library
634 books — 524 voters
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke
World Fantasy Award Winners
57 books — 275 voters

More…



Polls voted on by Lilou

Lists liked by Lilou