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Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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Mist on a lake, fog in thick woods, a golden light shining on wet stones—such sights make it all very easy. Something lives in the lake, rustles through the woods, inhabits the stones or the earth beneath them. Whatever it may be, this something lies just out of sight, but not out of vision for the eyes that never blink. In the right surroundings our entire being is made of eyes that dilate to witness the haunting of the universe. But really, do the right sur­roundings have to be so obvious in their spectral atmosphere?

Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

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Contrary to the realist story’s allegiance to the normal and the real, the world of the Gothic tale is fundamentally unreal and abnormal, harboring essences which are magical, timeless, and profound […] 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.

–Thomas Ligotti, “Notes on the Writing of Horror: A Story”

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We are aberrations—beings born undead, neither one thing nor another, or two things at once … uncanny things that have nothing to do with the rest of creation, horrors that poison the world by sowing our madness everywhere we go, glutting daylight and darkness with incorporeal obscenities.

Thomas Ligotti

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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, “The Shadow at the Bottom of the World”

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Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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‘The uncanny’ is first and foremost a sort of theme-index: an obsessional inventory of eerie fantasies, motifs, and effects, an itemized tropology of the weird. Doubles, dancing dolls and automata, waxwork figures, alter egos and 'mirror’ selves, spectral emanations, detached body parts ('a severed head, a hand cut off at the wrist, feet that dance by themselves’), the ghastly fantasy of being buried alive, omens, precognition, déjà vu...What makes them uncanny is precisely the way they subvert the distinction between the real and the phantasmic.

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer

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Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

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"My child is completely fine."

Ma'am your child's favorite character from bare is jason mcconnell

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i think one of the reasons i get mildly annoyed about worldbuilding threads that are 200 tweets of why you should care about where blue dye comes from in your world before saying someone is wearing blue is that so few of them go up to the second level of "and that should impact your characters somehow" - i don't care that blue dye comes from pressing berries that only grow in one kingdom a thousand miles away if people are casually wearing blue

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i know the 2017 tony’s was six years ago now but someone HAS to pay for all the incredulous crimes that were committed

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Just Like It Was Before from Bandstand is SO GOOD because so much art from that era romanticized the idea of a post war-life and Bandstand takes that and then contrasts it with the gut-wrenching reality that soldiers were coming home from a harrowing and traumatic experience with scars both visible and invisible and with the loss of so many others in the war. It shows how hard everyone's trying but they're just failing because the goal isn't attainable. You can't send boys to battle and expect them to come back the same. It's fair that people just wanted things to go back to normal, but that was never going to happen.

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