{"author":"Thomas Ligotti","author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti","total_quotes":70,"quotes":[{"text":"If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["examined-life","limits","nothing","ride","road","seek","seeking","solitude","truth"],"id":13497,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"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.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["1994","fate","foreword","outcry","weird","weird-fiction","why-me"],"id":50351,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"The ‘experimental’ writer, then, is simply following the story’s commands to the best of his human ability. The writer is not the story, the story is the story. See? Sometimes this is very hard to accept and sometimes too easy. On the one hand, there’s the writer who can’t face his fate: that the telling of a story has nothing at all to do with him; on the other hand, there’s the one who faces it too well: that the telling of the story has nothing at all to do with him.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["horror","story","writing"],"id":52176,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"There was simply no peace to be had no matter where you hid yourself away. Even in a northern border town of such intensely chaotic oddity and corruption there was still some greater chaos, some deeper insanity, than one had counted on, or could ever be taken into account - wherever there was anything, there would be chaos and insanity to such a degree that one could never come to terms with it, and it was only a matter of time before your world, whatever you thought it to be, was undermined, if not completely overrun, by another world.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["away","chaos","corruption","hide","insanity","oddity","overrun","peace","world"],"id":52373,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["fiction","horror","inspirational"],"id":52456,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"We think, therefore we should make everyone think what we think.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["intolerance","irony"],"id":60865,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written in embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble race is mine.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["ancestors","dead","the-lost-art-of-twilight","vampire"],"id":64061,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"Quinn seemed to have become one of a jaded philosophical society, a group of arcane deviates. Their raison d'etre was a kind of mystical masochism, forcing initiates toward feats of occult daredevilry - 'glimpsing the inferno with eyes of ice', to take from the notebook a phrase that was repeated often and seemed a sort of chant of power. As I suspected, hallucinogenic drugs were used by the sect, and there was no doubt that they believed themselves communing with strange metaphysical venues. Their chief aim, in true mystical fashion, was to transcend common reality in the search for higher states of being, but their stratagem was highly unorthodox, a strange detour along the usual path toward positive illumination. Instead, they maintained a kind of blasphemous fatalism, a doomed determinism which brought them face to face with realms of obscure horror. Perhaps it was this very obscurity that allowed them the excitement of their central purpose, which seemed to be a precarious flirting with personal apocalypse, the striving for horrific dominion over horror itself.('The Dreaming In Nortown').","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["apocalypse","arcane","blasphemous","blasphemy","fatalism","fear","hallucinogenic","hallucinogenic-drugs","higher-consciousness","horror","magick","metaphysical","mystical","mystical-encounter","mysticism","mystics","occult","occult-horror","occultism","philosophical-inquiry","sect","sects","terror","transcend"],"id":65926,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["1985","horror","nightmare"],"id":70304,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"},{"text":"To Eden with me you will not leaveTo live in a cottage of crazy, crooked eaves.In your own happy home you take care these nights; When you let your little cat in, please turn on the lights! Something scurries behind and finds a cozy place to stare, Something sent to you from paradise, with serpents to spare: Tongues flowering; they leap out laughing, lapping. Dissapear.","author":"Thomas Ligotti","tags":["esoteric","horror","nightmares"],"id":74616,"author_id":"Thomas+Ligotti"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":70,"pages":7,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}