Thomas Ligotti: Teatro Grottesco

It has always seemed to me that my existence consisted purely and exclusively of nothing but the most outrageous nonsense.

No one gives up on something until it turns on them, whether or not that thing is real or unreal.

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.

His trembling words also invoked an epistimology of 'hope and horror', of exposing once and for all the true nature of this 'great gray ritual of existence' and plunging headlong into an 'enlightenment of inanity'...

In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride.

Amnesia may well be the highest sacrament in the great gray ritual of existence.

What does it mean to be alive except to court disaster and suffering at every moment?

This heartbreaking sadness I suffer every minute of the day (and night), this killing sadness that feels as
if it will never leave me no matter where I go or what I do or whom I may ever know.