Noctuary Quotes

“personal well-being serves solely to excavate within your soul a chasm which waits to be filled by a landslide of dread, an empty mold whose peculiar dimensions will one day manufacture the shape of your unique terror”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“There is no nature to things,’ you wrote in the book. ‘There are no faces except masks held tight against the pitching chaos behind them.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“The darkness of the grotesque is an immortal enigma: in all legends of the dead, in all the tales of creatures of the night, in all the mythologies of mad gods and lucid demons, there remains a kind of mocking nonsense to the end, a thick and resonant voice which calls out from the heart of these stories and declares: 'Still I am here.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to liberate himself from the dungeon cell of his life.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“For wherever mystery serves as a foundation, only ruins may be erected.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“One day it would be over for all, that terrible dream of everlasting changes that held us to a place that never should have been if its greatest intention led only to wallowing in the muck of eternity.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“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.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“Indeed, Dr Haxhausen fought to preserve his freedom with very good reason, for he required a great deal of it—freedom, not reason—to pursue his plans for the future.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“The Master's Eyes Shining with Secrets

Those bells ringing on the mist-covered mountain signify that the Master of the Temple is dead. The fact of the matter is that the monks there finally killed him.

It seems that a few years ago the Master of the Temple began to exhibit some odd and very unpleasant forms of behavior. He apparently lost all sense of earthly decorum, even losing control over his own body. At one point an extra head sprouted from the side of the Master's neck, and this ugly little thing started to issue all sorts of commands and instructions to the monks which only their lofty sense of decency and order prevented them from carrying out. Eventually the Master of the Temple was confined to a small room in an isolated part of the monastery. There, this once wise and beloved teacher was looked after like an animal. For several years the monks put up with the noises he made, the diverse shapes he took. Finally, they killed him.

It is whispered among students of enlightenment that one may achieve a state of being in which enlightenment itself loses all meaning, with the consequence that one thereby becomes subject to all manner of strange destinies.

And the monks? After the assassination they scattered in all directions. Some hid out in other monasteries, while others went back to live among the everyday inhabitants of this earth. But it was not as if they could escape their past by fleeing it, no more than they could rid themselves of their old master by killing him.

For even after the death of his material self, the Master of the Temple sought out those who were once under his guidance; and upon these unhappy disciples he now bestowed, somewhat insistently, his terrible illumination.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“Paradoxically, it is the uncommon event that may best demonstrate the common predicament of our race.  ”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“He became a seeker of crowds, but the crowds thinned and abandoned him. He became a seeker of lights, but the lights grew strange and led him into desolate places.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“In fact, they use everyone and have always used everyone, because they are from the old time, the time before all the worlds awoke from a long and mindless night. And these dreams, these things that are called dreams, are still working to throw us back into that great mad darkness, to exhaust each one one of us in our lonely sleep and to use up everyone until death.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“Throughout the most innocent mornings and unclouded afternoons there endures a kind of restless pulling at appearances, an awkward or expert fussing with the facade of objects.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“The stars were a frozen effervescence.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary