Benjamin Percy > Quotes

“Bookstores should be broken down into two sections: books that suck and books that don’t suck.”
― Benjamin Percy

“Plagues don't just kill people—and that's what lobos is, a plague—they kill humanity.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

“...if he sees his fellow humans as anything more than complicated animals. Not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design.”
― Benjamin Percy

“When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug - riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Wilding

“Her husband once said that he believed some sort of mathematical equation could be applied to life - since the longer you lived, the greater its seeming velocity. She always attributed this to familiarity. If you kept the same habits - and if you lived in the same place, worked in the same place - then you no longer spent a lot of time noticing. Noticing things - and trying to make sense of them - is what makes time remarkable. Otherwise, life blurs by, as it does now, so that she has difficulty keeping track of time at all, one day evaporating into the next.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

“The best way to mess with the head of your reader is to strategize the delivery of bad news.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“The editor-writer relationship should not be thought of as adversarial.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Q: What’s the key to suspense? A: I’ll tell you later.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“It’s hard to become an adult in the place where you grew up. Because you can never escape who you were.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Ninth Metal

“Fear beats logic every time,”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dead Lands

“All stories are in conversation with other stories. —Neil Gaiman”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dead Lands

“We wore headlamps and the sight of us bobbing up the hill or zipping perilously down it had the look of busy stars, as if the night sky had come down to join us in our play.”
― Benjamin Percy

“The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can't quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That's how it is between them. There is something celestial about her, her skin a pale color, but a paleness of the softest gray-white imaginable, as if she had been soaking for years in a bath of moonlight.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

“... he feels the darkness of the grave pressing around the fire and infecting his vision so that there seems to be no separation between the living and the dead, a child born with a mud wasp's nest for a heart and its eyes already pocketed with dust, ready to be clapped into a box and dropped down a hole.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

“Someone once told him the scariest part of any story was when a character crept forward to investigate a strange sound. Whatever nightmare waited around the corner did not matter, its revelation almost always a disappointment. It was the imagined threat that mattered most.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dead Lands

“You know what your problem is? You're so convinced you're bad, it gets in the way of being good.”
― Benjamin Percy

“It’s like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don’t you see, that’s a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dead Lands

“I would expect someone in a cell to be a touch more deferential. In fact, I’d love to see you down on your knees, begging for forgiveness.”
― Benjamin Percy

“The more characters you have, the bigger the book, the more flaming chain saws.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“Books are like batteries, he says. And you grow a little stronger by reading them, surrounding yourself with them.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dark Net

“For those who have never visited it, the downtown Powell’s takes up a whole city block. A giant concrete split-level sarcophagus of books. There is a ghost that haunts the water fountain. An urn of cremated remains that moves from room to room. The shelves spill books, used and new, and the aisles buzz with the kind of diversity you’ll only find at the DMV: dudes in suits and dudes in mud-caked cowboy boots, a woman with dreads and a woman with a tiara and a woman with bright blue hair. A carnival of wonders for a kid from the boonies.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“In fact, the Internet would not exist if not for the fiber cables that vein the ground beneath our streets, through our sewers. There are around eighty major network junctions—known as IXPs, for Internet exchange points—throughout the country. These are the freeways that feed the domestic traffic as well as the international data that comes from undersea cables. They are nakedly unprotected. As are the fiber cables that branch off them and come together—at pinch points, spaghetti junctions—within the data centers.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dark Net

“What matters is hunger. Appetite. In this way I have become what I behold.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

“Fight back. Bite back.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

“You’ve got to write every day as if you were clocking in for a job. Or if not every day, then damn near it. If you’re not disciplined in your production—if you’re writing only when the mood strikes or when a deadline looms—then naturally you’ll be more protective of your work, so that when it comes time to cut, your saw will tremble with hesitation. But if you’re producing reams of pages, you’ll be less resistant to revision, because you know it won’t be long before another load of timber comes down the road.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“a black site, a night chapel, spoiled land, a kind of charging station for evil. “They’re all over the place. The Paris catacombs, Guantánamo Bay, Lake Powell, the Bellagio, the House on the Rock, the Golden Gate Bridge.” There are at least two others in Oregon alone. The Rajneesh compound and the Lava River Cave.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dark Net

“Matters of the heart make your world worth occupying.”
― Benjamin Percy, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction

“But if she did respond, she would bring up their father, an architect who spent his career blueprinting and supervising the construction of office buildings and restaurants and churches and houses all over the metro. Whenever they were driving, Dad never took a direct route, always going out of his way to visit a building of his, and when they passed it, he would slow and point and say, “I made that.” That’s the kind of satisfaction she feels every time she picks up a paper and sees her byline. “I made that.”
― Benjamin Percy, The Dark Net

“They wear masks that hide how hairy they are on the inside.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon

“Transformation is forbidden.”
― Benjamin Percy, Red Moon