Chris Adrian > Quotes

“I am...sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“If there’s a magic pony in the story, chances are I’ll read it.”
― Chris Adrian

“It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder.

"I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“The knowledge of my depravity is the only thing that makes me special... that I have always always always known, and have never for a moment been able to forget, that there is something terribly wrong with me.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“I used to feel sorry for them, or sad. Not so much any more. Now I wonder what they did, and I know what they did, and all I can think is how all that water is barely enough to cover it up.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“I am...sad and angry. I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she'd gone.”
― Chris Adrian, Gob's Grief

“I shall not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.”
― Chris Adrian, The Children's Hospital

“We are so lucky to live here," he would say, and she couldn't disagree. They were lucky that the earth had conspired to heap up such startling beauty in one place, and they were lucky that it hadn't all fallen apart yet in a a geological catastrophe.”
― Chris Adrian

“He liked to think that he tolerated more strangeness than most people, because he knew from experience that life was generally much stranger than most folks could imagine.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“Maybe I'm too crazy to be in a relationship," Henry said, which was his familiar response to Bobby's familiar discourse about the future. It felt like a grown-up thing to say, and like a difficult concession, and what he meant by it was I am trying as hard as I can and it's not enough for you or even Why can't my weak eccentricities be adorable to you, as yours are to me? But Bobby always heard it as a conversation stopper, childish and easy and glib.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“It was something he would figure out only after Bobby dumped him: that his imagination was what made the real world, and real people, only barely palatable for him.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“He never got a really proper look at them, but the situation told him it must be a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“They had been quarrelling for as long as they had been in love.”
― Chris Adrian

“Or she might put on the ring and understand immediately how it was a mistake to wear it, and yet know that no matter how she pulled at it, it would never come off, and if she should chop off her finger then she would only grow another one, and liquid gold would seep out of her skin and form itself again into a perfect and perfectly awful circle. Rob would get it, too - the feeling like the stony feeling. They would lie next to each other with stones in their bellies, trying not to touch, Everyone else in the hospital would know it and feel it also: a great mistake had been committed. It would sap everyone's enthusiasm, and efforts to remake and improve the world would dwindle - what's the use anymore, they would all ask themselves, it's all already been ruined by this ill-advised marriage. The child would ripen and emerge and weep for its parents and when it could talk the first thing it would ask would be, why did you do it? Every night her brother's ghost would come shake a chain of bones over her head and say, I fucking told you, and every morning they would wake up to a sea a little higher than the day before, not sure who this other person was in their bed, and not understanding why they hated this person so much.”
― Chris Adrian

“The difference, she decided, was that now there was something to be done. Hell would be raised, and Oberon would come or not, but at least there would be no more idle tears. The night would end in joy or ruin, and somehow that was easier to abide than an endless, static grief.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“There he began to write out all the memories of his wife he had been holding on to in the secret, stupid hope that he would be allowed to carry them along with him into the new world. He quietly and dilligently inscribed his love upon the page, pressing firmly as if to pin the words and their feelings to the paper. But since he could still remember what it had been like to want something with his whole heart and know he couldn't have it, he said to himself, Now it really does feel like being alive again.”
― Chris Adrian

“She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“She was doing just what it looked like she was doing, lying about, half-awake and half-asleep, passing the time and waiting for something to change. Because it seemed very clear to her, in those first few days, that what she felt was so intolerable that it couldn't possibly last, and if she did nothing to distract herself from it, she'd use it up, and then she'd be able to get up, and move about, and care once again about her duties to her people, about her constitutional obligations to dancing and singing and feasting and praising the movements of the stars. She didn't consider at all--she didn't dare to consider--that the sources of grief inside her might be inexhaustible.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“What she had done over the past year had required an equivalent expenditure of energy to a year-long sprint, and when she thought of it that way it was obviously an unreasonable thing to do. Remaining sane--clinging and grasping at it, seeking to please a propriety constructed by people whose boyfriends had never killed themselves--was in fact the most insane thing she could have done, and anyone properly equipped by the right kind of experience would understand that.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“(Fuck)! Jim cried, and certainly it felt like a generative word. It felt like he was using it correctly for the first time, like saying Jesus! when you saw Him in a piece of blackened toast, or Oh my God! when a bush in your backyard happened spontaneously to burst into flame.”
― Chris Adrian, The New World

“She had spent the majority of her days in some sort of a tizzy and had developed over the course of her life a tizzy repertoire of abundant variety, from the black depressive tizzy to the anxious weepy tizzy to the more traditional furious tizzy, which almost always involved projectiles.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night