Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Thomas Ligotti

Quote by Thomas Ligotti

“This practice of his allowed him to express a mode of personal identity, however trivial and illusory, as if such a thing could be achieved merely by adorning oneself with a particular item of apparel or even by displaying particular character traits such as a reserved manner or a high degree of intelligence, all and any of which qualities were shared by millions and millions of persons past and present and would continue to be exhibited by millions and millions of persons in the future, making the effort to perpetrate a distinctive sense of an identity apart from other persons or creatures, or even inanimate objects, no more than a ludicrous charade.”

Quote by Thomas Ligotti

Create image

Author

Thomas Ligotti
Thomas Ligotti

Thomas Ligotti, born on July 9, 1953, is an American author known for his surrealistic and existentialist themes that explore the absurdity and despair of human existence. His distinctive writing style has earned him a dedicated following among readers. more

You May Also Like

“Just as man, as a social being, cannot in the long run exist without a tie to the community, so the individual will never find the real justification for his existence, and his own spiritual and moral autonomy, anywhere except in an extramundane principle capable of relativizing the overpowering influence of external factors. The individual who is not anchored in God can offer no resistance on his own resources to the physical and moral blandishments of the world. For this he needs the evidence of inner, transcendent experience which alone can protect him from the otherwise inevitable submersion in the mass.”

ReligionIndividualIndividualityState
Book:The Undiscovered Self
Create image

“As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge. An ideal understanding would ultimately result in each party’s unthinkingly going along with the other’s experience – a state of uncritical passivity coupled with the most complete subjectivity and lack of social responsibility. Understanding carried to such lengths is in any case impossible, for it would require the virtual identification of two different individuals. Sooner or later the relationship reaches a point where one partner feels he is being forced to sacrifice his own individuality so that it may be assimilated by that of the other. This inevitable consequence breaks the understanding, for understanding presupposes the integral preservation of the individuality of both partners”

UnderstandingIndividualitySubjectivity
Book:The Undiscovered Self
Create image

“The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is YOU. Your voice, your mind your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”

WritingCreativityLivingIndividuality
Book:The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction
Create image

“There is doubtless such a thing as a ’national character’. In art, it is the lowest common denominator. The more specific the character, the more commonplace it is. That is why creation always requires overcoming such a character. An artist, if he is anything, is an individual. But to be an individual means embodying your own truths, suffering your own experiences, and inventing your own style. But these things can only occur by renouncing facility, and the most unfortunate facility comes from these so-called national characters, formed by the sedimentation of collective mediocrity, which lies there ready-made. National character is by definition that which remains in a culture after you have removed the personal effort involved in thinking, the personal experience of life and the triumph of individual creation.”

ArtIndividualityPolitical Philosophy
Book:For Two Thousand Years
Create image

“Marriage can be made to work if both the partners can see beyond themselves and understand the limitations,needs and abilities of the other person and are willing to embrace the positive and negative aspects of each other in their understanding. But it never happens that way. We expect others to understand and comply with us while we fail to do the same. Thus marriage loses all it's sheen by the time the couple reaches middle age.”

WritingPhilosophyUnderstandingMarriageWriter
Book:Delayed Monsoon
Create image

“When he was twenty-five and new to the city, he had lived at the Irvines', and Mr. Irvine would talk to him [...] and had given him advice: not advice about how to think as much as advice about how to be, about how to be a curiosity in a world in which curiosities weren't often tolerated. "[...] if you act like you don't belong, if you act like you're apologetic for your own self, then people will start to treat you that way, too." [...] Be as steely as you want to be [...] Don't try to get people to like you. Never try to make yourself more palatable in order to make your colleagues more comfortable.”

IndividualitySelf Acceptance
Book:A Little Life
Create image

“The laces, untied, the socks won't match. I won't know what to wear and when to wear it and I am rubbish at the small talk required to fit into places I've never bothered to fit into. There are square pegs that spend their lives trying to squeeze into round holes, but I wasn't even given four straight sides, I am shapes when none are required, I am a million wrongs stuffed into something I never asked if it was right. I am this, and I've never been that, I've no plans to remedy the broken bits.”

PoetryIndividualityAuthenticityAwkwardnessNot Fitting In
Book:Wildly into the Dark: Typewriter Poems and the Rattlings of a Curious Mind
Create image