Quirk Quotation Classics

[G. S. Carnivals]

"I - call me Ishmael - was chosen to unravel his secrets and find what malice or indifference he harbored toward our town."

Thomas Ligotti and Herman Melville - Flowers of the Moby Dick Abyss

[Michael]

"All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way as they hear the perfect sound to accompany a passing anecdote of some obscure hell."

Thomas Ligotti and Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina's Frolic

[G. S. Carnivals]

"It has long been my practice to wander late at night and often to attend movie theaters at this time. It was evident somebody had miscalculated, for the suburb had quit growing and here was the theater, a pink stucco cube, sitting out in a field all by itself."

Walker Percy and Thomas Ligotti - The Moviegoer Glamour

[sundog]

-

Leaves of Nethescurial


Walt Whitman & Thomas Ligotti

Song of Itself

It celebrates itself, and sings itself,
And what it assumes you shall assume,
For every atom belongs to it.

______________


A child said, What is this world? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hideous dark-green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the emanation of a pandemoniac Entity,
Of a single, unified, and transcendent stuff,
Circulating within all things and unifying them in an infinitely extensive body of evil,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
Wickedly repulsive in its design,
Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing amid the rooms of our houses and beyond their walls, beneath dark waters and across moonlit skies,
Below earth mound and above mountain peak, in northern leaf and southern flower,
Upon the watchful winds of this and the several worlds.

And now it seems to me a mere mask for the foulest evil,
An absolute evil whose reality is mitigated only by our blindness to it,
An evil at the heart of things,
Existing inside each star and the voids between them, within blood and bone, throughout all souls and spirits,
Behind the faces of the living and the dead.

The cancerous totality of all creatures,
The oozing ichor that flows within all things,
Shows there is really no hope or consolation except in the evil to which we willingly abandon ourselves,
And if ever there was it ceased the moment life appeared.

And to die is different from what any one supposed,
For it is dying in a feverish nightmare of a demonic demiurge,
A place of infinite darkness and ubiquitous malignity in which we walk unaware.

O Supreme Nethescurial!