17 quotes
The only value of this world lay in its power - at certain times - to suggest another world.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2015)
It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.
Teatro Grottesco (2008)
Madness, chaos, bone-deep mayhem, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.
Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2015)
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.
The Spectral Link (2014)
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.
Teatro Grottesco (2008)
If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
...One must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
To be alive is to inhabit a nightmare without hope of awakening to a natural world, to have our bodies embedded neck-deep in a quagmire of dread, to live as shut-ins in a house of horrors from which nobody gets out alive.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
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 Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
You lie in the bed,
an arm full of tubes,
a mind full of drugs,
but still thinking.
You see the figure
enter the quiet room
and you lift your arm
and focus your mind.
You ask the doctor,
if it can be arranged,
that your last day
not be your worst day.
Death Poems (2013)
As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have an unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including “everything happens for a reason,” “the show must go on,” “accept the things you cannot change,” and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins up.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
“We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.”
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)
Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and everything else that puts both average and above-average citizens in the limelight, pessimists are sideliners in both history and the media. Without a belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, they could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause.
DISILLUSIONMENT CAN BE GLAMOROUS, an interview with Thomas Ligotti by E.M. Angerhuber (EMA) and Thomas Wagner (TW), January 2001 for The Art of GrimScribe
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.
The Shadow at The Bottom of The World (2005)
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.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)