Tim Curran > Quotes

“the fog was fog and yet was not fog. it was liquid and solid, then gas, then a roiling putrescence expanding like a balloon blown with filth.”
― Tim Curran

“that’s how things worked in places like this that were sculpted from the bits and pieces of nightmare.”
― Tim Curran, Doll Face

“All he had to do was think of Linda at home, eight months into it, knowing that he was going to be a father and that straightened him right out. Feelings are just feelings, but families need to be fed.”
― Tim Curran, Blood, Bones and Bullets

“Good old Crazy Jack Dirker. You just couldn’t rattle the man. He could talk about dismembering a baby same way he talked about trimming his toenails. That chiseled face was incapable of emotion. It knew not hate or anger, love nor happiness. Only the eyes were alive in that mask. Course, last time Cabe had seen him, he was wearing the dark blue sack coat and Jeff Davis hat of a Union Army lieutenant. Cabe”
― Tim Curran, Skin Medicine

“three pale yellow moons floating amid black stars, and a stunted forest along the banks of a black lake that drew the eyes to a castle, huge and decayed, perilously perched on an outcrop of crystal. And although it was far off, a figure clearly stood there on the highest battlement, long black robes flapping in the breeze. It turned towards me, a wrinkled yellow mask with no features.”
― Tim Curran, In the Court of the Yellow King

“They were alien, ghastly, utter abominations. But as scientists, we could not leave them be. Curiosity, the bane of our existence, demanded that we examine them.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“We did not wait around. That thing was coming for us and we knew it. It would punish us. It would kill us. It would make us part of it.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“What it wanted were minds to fill with gnawing pestilence and souls it could eat raw and squirming.”
― Tim Curran, The Dead Sea

“bullshit”
― Tim Curran, Leviathan

“Though he could not honestly believe in some invisible, mythical god, he could understand religion now. He could understand that it was a security blanket men wrapped around themselves. Maybe it was dark and close under that blanket and you couldn’t see more than a few inches in any direction, but it was safe. God created Heaven and Earth. There was a serenity to that, now wasn’t there? It was simple and reassuring. And if religion was indeed a sheltering blanket, then science was the cold hand which yanked it away, showing man his ultimate insignificance in the greater scheme of things, the truth about his origins and destiny.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“«Non si deve pensare... che l'uomo sia stato il primo o che sarà l'ultimo dei padroni della Terra, o che la semplice materia vitale e sostanziale sia la sola a camminare. Gli Antichi erano, gli Antichi solo e gli Antichi saranno. Non negli spazi che noi conosciamo, ma tra di essi, loro incedono sereni e primordiali, senza dimensioni e invisibili ai nostri occhi.»”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“Whomever or whatever had been in control of the universe before was in control no longer.”
― Tim Curran, In the Court of the Yellow King

“The Shoggoth seemed to be expanding, inflating, a hideous steaming oven of flesh, a spontaneous combustion of sluicing, breathing tissue. It threw out limbs—pink-suckered tentacles and scaly crab claws, the spurred legs of a climbing insect and countless vermiform limbs like immense writhing pale earthworms. Its mass burst open with seeping pustules that were eyes and then mouths howling like hurricane winds. It gushed a river of foul green jelly and sprouted a thousand wavering tendrils that were seamless and transparent like tentacles of glass, then sucked them back in as easily as a man sucks in air.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“Oh, we are thawing our friend here, boys, but it won’t be by accident. And don’t worry, this creature has been dead a long, long time.” “Famous last words,” Hayes said and they all had a laugh over that. Except Lind.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“She moved mainly by pushing with her knees and hips. Her good hand was at her belly, holding her guts in place, keeping her entrails tucked in. They were warm and greasy under her fingers. Even though she was dying inch by inch, she knew they were valuable and she couldn’t let them go. Already, her open belly was packed with brown leaves and dirt and dry pine needles.”
― Tim Curran, Blooding Night

“He ain’t bloody human, he’s half-penguin and half-billy goat.” All”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“The tunnel was made of bodies. They were faintly luminous like noctilucae. They grew in and out of the walls in a deranged, pulsating anatomical puzzle, something that was part machine and part living tissue, a terrible excrescence of fleshy hoses and bone pipes and convoluted networks of tissue and gears and ribbed projections, jutting bones and limbs and agonized faces with hollow-socketed eyes. A nightmare, industrialized fusion welded into a common whole, horribly alive and functioning in some dire symbiosis.”
― Tim Curran, The Sunken City

“He imagined the world without men. Cities would be reclaimed by nature and overgrown until, hundreds of years hence, they would look much like the mysterious ruins sticking out of the jungles of Asia and South America. Ruins, relics, no more. He honestly did not believe the entire race would be exterminated, just the lion’s share. What was left would be very little different from Neolithic man—hunters and scavengers. Beasts that would rob from each other, rape, murder, and hunt each other down as prey. Essentially, what men were now, but without anything but the most rudimentary tribal traditions to support them and absolutely no laws to prevent them from acting like the slavering beasts they indeed were. Hunters and killers, apex predators that would abandon their churches to worship in the forest and give praise to the cycles of the moon. Given time, things like ethics and morality and even higher culture itself would be forgotten.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“the Frankendoll monstrosity”
― Tim Curran, Doll Face

“he was occasionally visible in the distorted glass of certain antique mirrors or in pools of October rain.”
― Tim Curran, In the Court of the Yellow King

“Strange is the night where black stars rise,’ “‘And strange moons circle through the skies.”
― Tim Curran, In the Court of the Yellow King

“It was like a weird electricity was running through her,”
― Tim Curran, Doll Face

“Camilla: Its lips move... but it makes no sound. Why doesn’t it make a sound? Cassilda: (Giggling now.) It cannot. Its mouth is filled with flies.”
― Tim Curran, In the Court of the Yellow King

“Given time, even grand revelations became mundane. You made some discovery that will alter our view of who and what we are? It might change civilization as we know it? No shit? Ain’t that something. You wanna hear something better? Word has it a couple of the techies over at the Drill Tower are doing some drilling of a more intimate nature, you catch my drift, sunshine.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“I am your soul and I am beautiful, I am a lover’s sonnet and silver rain, now destroy me…if you love me, destroy me.”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“Grief to them was brutal, organic, and uncompromising”
― Tim Curran, Horrors of War

“No, those bas-reliefs were not beautiful. They were not the works of a race with poetry and romance in their souls. They were stark, alien, and execrable. The artwork of spiders or centipedes. But”
― Tim Curran, Hive

“Stava ascoltando delle cose nella foschia: i suoni di incubi pelagici che lo richiamavano. Cose che aspettavano che cadesse in mare, cose con occhi gialli e tentacoli e denti affilati, malignità e mostri. Continuava a ripetersi: Non pensarci, non pensare a nessuna di queste cose perché è tutto nella tua testa… è soltanto immaginazione, tutto qui. Ed era un ragionamento sensato, ma non reggeva perché era solo e tutto ciò che aveva per compagnia era la sua mente e a lei piaceva giocargli brutti scherzi. Gli diceva che onestamente non importava se lui pensava a quelle cose, perché quelle cose stavano pensando a lui. Era una follia, ma poi la sua mente si oscurò e gli chiese se riusciva a sentirli, là fuori, quegli orrori neri e dementi nella nebbia, che pensavano a lui e si concentravano su di lui”
― Tim Curran, Dead Sea

“hallway, struck—at least I was—by a sense of, I don’t know, a sort of a neutrality, if that makes any sense. What we had heard wasn’t there. There was no one on the second floor but us. Then Johnny elbowed me and I saw, God, I saw, all right.” “What did you see?” Kenney said, tense himself by that point. “Dirty tracks, old dirty tracks on the floor and they led down the hallway, led to a set of narrow steps at the end. Those steps led up to the attic and that’s when we realized that Genevieve was keeping her dead daughter up in the attic. The passageway going up there was narrow, we had to go up one at a time. Johnny led. We had no weapons except for my”
― Tim Curran, Nightcrawlers

“She watched with unblinking, fearful eyes as the face of a smiling mannequin woman cracked open with a rubbery, shearing sound like a soft-shelled egg and four, then five puckering baby doll faces emerged like hungry chicks, oval mouths opening and closing, suctioning like blowholes.”
― Tim Curran, Doll Face