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Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe QUOTES

Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " 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

3 " When the world uncovers some dark disguise,
Embrace the darkness with averted eyes. "

― Thomas Ligotti , Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

4 " Forsake the world and cling to the shadows. "

― Thomas Ligotti , Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

5 " 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

6 " 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

7 " 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

8 " 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

9 " 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

10 " 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

11 " 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

12 " ... 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

13 " 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

14 " 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

15 " Creativity isn't always an index of niceness "

― Thomas Ligotti , Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

16 " H.P. Lovecraft is a self-admitted early influence on Ligotti’s work. However, in a kind of metaphysical horror story of its own, Ligotti early on subsumed Lovecraft and left his dry husk behind, having taken what sustenance he needed for his own devices. (Most other writers are, by contrast, consumed by Lovecraft when they attempt to devour him.) "

― Thomas Ligotti , Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe

17 " 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

18 " 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

19 " 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

20 " 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