Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe Quotes

“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

“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.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“While horror may make us squirm or quake, it will not make us cry at the pity of things. The vampire may symbolize our horror of both life and death, but none of us has ever been uprooted by a symbol. The zombie may conceptualize our sickness of the flesh and its appetites, but no one has ever been sickened to death by a concept.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“If things are not what they seem—and we are forever reminded that this is the case—then it must also be observed that enough of us ignore this truth to keep the world from collapsing.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“... the logic of supernatural horror [is] a logic founded on fear, a logic whose sole principle states: "Existence equals nightmare." Unless life is a dream, nothing makes sense. For as a reality, it is a rank failure..”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“When the world uncovers some dark disguise,
Embrace the darkness with averted eyes.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Forsake the world and cling to the shadows.”
― 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 These are the days of second-hand fantasies and out-of-date distractions.”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

“So, to do right by a Gothic tale, let's be frank, requires that the author be a militant romantic who relates the action of his narratives in dreamy and more than usually emotive language. Hence, the well-known grandiose rhetoric of the Gothic tale, which may be understood by the sympathetic reader as not just an inflatable raft on which the imagination floats at its leisure upon waves of bombast, but also as the sails of the Gothic artist's soul filling up with the winds of ecstatic hysteria. So it's hard to tell someone how to write the Gothic tale, since one really has to be born to the task. Too bad.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Madness, chaos, bone-deep mayhem, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“But the secrets of such a book are not perpetual. Once they are known, they become relegated to a lesser sphere, which is that of the knower. Having lost the prestige they once enjoyed, these former secrets now function as tools in the excavation of still deeper ones which, in turn, will suffer the same corrosive fate. And this is the fate of all the secrets of the universe. Eventually the seeker of a recondite knowledge may conclude—either through insight or sheer exhaustion—that this ruthless process is never-ending, that the mortification of one mystery after another has no terminus beyond that of the seeker's own extinction. And how many still remain susceptible to the search? How many pursue it to the end of their days with undying hope of some ultimate revelation? Better not to think in precise terms just how few the faithful are.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“The trees were set close and from the perimeter of that parcel of land I could not see the school hidden within them. Look up here, I thought I heard someone say to me. When I did look up, I saw that the branches overhead were without leaves, and through their intertwining mesh the sky was fully visible. How bright and dark it was at the same time. Bright with a high, full moon shining among the spreading clouds, and dark with the shadows mingling within those clouds—a slowly flowing mass of mottled shapes, a kind of unclean outpouring from the black sewers of space.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“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

“Sometimes you just have to keep some distance between yourself and reality, even if it means becoming a little less human.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“All that was left to us was to wonder: who knows all that is innate to this world, or to any other? Why should there not be something buried deep within appearances, something that wears a mask to hide itself behind the visibility of nature?”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“The embodiment of his mystic precepts, he appeared at any given moment to be on the verge of an amazing disintegration, his particular complex of atoms ready to go shooting off into the great void like a burst of fireworks.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“And so I had to turn corners inside-out with my eyes and to read the third side of a book's page, seeking in futility to gaze at what I could then touch with none of my senses.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Two tiny corpses, one male and the other female, rattle around that enormous closet in my bedroom. Though deceased, still they are quick enough to hide themselves whenever I need to enter the closet to retrieve something.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“So it is that supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not the pastime of even our closest relations in the wholly natural world: we gained it, as part of our gloomy inheritance, when we became what we are. Once awareness of the human predicament was achieved, we immediately took off in two directions, splitting ourselves down the middle. One half became dedicated to apologetics, even celebration, of our new toy of consciousness. The other half condemned and occasionally launched direct assaults on this "gift.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Something statuesque is approaching her. It radiates a field of dynamic tension that grows more intense the closer it comes, its shadow lengthening upon the floor. Still, she cannot turn around to see the horror behind her, for at this point she cannot move her body, which is stiff-jointed and rigid. Perhaps she can scream, she thinks, and makes an attempt to do so. But this fails, because by then there is already a firm and tepid hand that has covered her mouth from behind. The fingers on her lips feel like thick, naked crayons.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“There are things which only madmen fear because only madmen may truly conceive of them.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Pausing for a moment, as I routinely do when crossing one of these bridges, I gazed not down into the dark waters of the canal, but upwards into the night sky. It was those stars, I knew that now. Certain of them had been promised specific parts of my body. In the darkest hours of the night, when one is unusually sensitive to such things, I could—and still can, just barely—feel the force of these stars tugging away at various points, eager for the moment of my death when each of them might carry off that part of me which is theirs by right. Of course a child would misinterpret this experience. And how often I have found that every superstition has its basis in truth.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“she is overwhelmed by an amorphous anxiety without a specific source.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Some uncomfortable moments later Day told me she had a prior engagement and was running late. It seemed she had made girl plans with a girlfriend of hers to do some girly things girls do when they get together with others of their kind. I said I understood, and I did. There is no doubt in my mind of the gender of Day’s companion this night, and perhaps other nights I did not know about.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“I continued to stare at the empty seat because my sensation of a vibrant presence there was unrelieved. And in my staring I perceived that the fabric of the seat, the inner webbing of swirling fibers, had composed a pattern in the image of a face—an old woman's face with an expression of avid malignance—floating amidst wild shocks of twisting hair.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“Once and for all, let us speak the paradox aloud: "We have been force-fed for so long the shudders of a thousand graveyards that at last, seeking a macabre redemption, a salvation by horror, we willingly consume the terrors of the tomb...and find them to our liking.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“And yet, somehow concealed in the shadows of what you can see is something that is not yet visible, something that is beating like a thunderous pulse and promises still greater visions. All else is merely its membrane enclosing the ultimate thing waiting to be born, preparing for the cataclysm which will be both the beginning and the end. To behold the prelude to this event is an experience of unbearable anticipation, so that ecstasy and dread merge into a new emotion, one corresponding perfectly to the exposure of the ultimate source of all manifestation. The”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“After all, many people came here for vaguely therapeutic reasons, believing there were medicines dispensed by the very mood of the town’s quaint streets and its sea-licked shores.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“The streets were sinuous entrails winding through that dark body, and each edifice was the jutting bone of a skeleton hung with a thin musculature of shadows”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

“I have no hopes, only a searing curiosity to riddle the corpse of my dead sou”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe