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.

Phil Sandifer: Neoreaction a Basilisk

Let us assume that we are fucked.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Amerikanah

Racism should never have happened and so you don't get a cookie for reducing it.

If you don't understand, ask questions. If you're uncomfortable about asking questions, say you are uncomfortable about asking questions and then ask anyway. It's easy to tell when a question is coming from a good place. Then listen some more. Sometimes people just want to feel heard. Here's to possibilities of friendship and connection and understanding.

If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.

Victor Pelevin: Babylon

In order for him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief, because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia.

How can non-existence get sick of itself?


Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.

Isaac Deutscher: The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921 - 1929

There it sinks into a coma between two thin stretches of woods. Day after day passes. More and more empty tins are lying by the side of the train. Crows and magpies gather for the feast in larger and larger flocks. Wasteland ... solitude ... the fox has laid his stealthy tracks to the very train. The engine, one carriage hitched to it, makes daily trips to a larger station to fetch our midday meal and newspapers. Influenza has invaded our compartments. We re-read Anatole France and Klyuchevsky's History .... The cold is 53 degrees below zero. Our engine keeps rolling back and forth . . . to avoid freezing . . . we do not even know where we are.


From this train, through the darkness of night, Trotsky saw Russia for the last time. The train ran through the streets and the harbour of Odessa, the city of his childhood and his first ambitions and dreams of the world. In his memories there always stood out the old Tsarist governor of Odessa who had exercised 'absolute power with an uncurbed temper' and who 'standing in his carriage, fully erect, shouted curses in his hoarse voice across the street, shaking his fist'. Another cursing and hoarse voice and another shaking fist--or was it the same?-now pursued the man in his fiftieth year through the streets of his childhood. Once the sight of the satrap made him shrink, 'adjust the school bag and hurry home'. Now the prison-train hurried through the harbour where he was to embark on a boat which would take him to the unknown; and he could only reflect on the incongruity of his fate.

David King: Russian Revolutionary Posters

Vladimir Sorokin: The Blizzard

Crouper brushed off the snow with his mitten: Glass sparkled. He cleaned the snow off the object. It turned out to be a large, three-bucket, green glass bottle set in a basket holder.

‘So that’s it, yur ’onor. . . .’ Crouper cleared the snow from the enormous bottleneck, and sniffed it. ‘Vodka!’

He kicked the crust of ice on the bottle, knocked it off, and turned it over. Not a drop came out.

‘Drunk up the whole thing, he did,’ Crouper concluded reproachfully.

‘He drank it,’ the doctor agreed, ‘and gave up the ghost right on the road. There you have it, good old Russian stupidity.’