Skip to content

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 The Shadow at The Bottom of The World (2005)

Another quote →

More quotes by Thomas Ligotti

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)

All Thomas Ligotti quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Ligotti (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.