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there is no such thing as a happy ending. There are only good stopping places.”
She’d always assumed that religion was something you did in polite company, not in private. Surely nobody actually believed any of the stuff they agreed to on Sundays. Pierce was a boy. Shouldn’t he push for more, trying to see what he could get away with? Did anyone think Jesus Christ gave a damn how they used their private parts? Pierce should be overjoyed that she’d shown some interest in his penis, shouldn’t he?
She found Lovecraft almost unreadable. The stories had characters inasmuch as there were named people who existed on the page, but they never grew or changed or engaged in any meaningful human interactions. Whenever they spoke, they sounded like anthropomorphized textbooks from alternate dimensions.
It was sort of the opposite of Moses and the burning bush, or Paul on the road to Damascus. The same basic concept as religion—the world is not the world—but twisted.
“I guess there’s rich and then there’s rich. From down here it all looks the same.”
“I think horror is the most important fiction in the world,” he said.
As though the room itself is inside the sound.
Stephen King, Angela Carter, Peter Straub, Shirley Jackson, William Peter Blatty, Ira Levin, James Herbert, Ramsey Campbell, Thomas Tryon, and, of course, H. P. Lovecraft.
Living with a family wounded by a loss you can’t remember is like sitting behind a tall person at a movie theater. The people around you are laughing, crying, reacting to something, but you have no idea what.
It was my first experience with getting something I wanted the wrong way, thereby ruining the thing gotten.
Dear Noah, Today I was in my geology lab, staring out the window, and I started thinking about all the layers of the earth, and how as we dig/drill/what-have-you, we pull up all these things that are new to us, but are actually ancient. I wonder if human beings aren’t the same? Like every tic of personality, every talent or shortcoming is already in place, waiting to be discovered. My love of writing, for example: Did that already exist, as soon as I was born? Or did it take shape after Dad bought my first computer? I like to think it was already there, and Dad was just smart enough to know
...more
There was pleasure commingled with the surprise, but more an intellectual pleasure at the fact of having kissed a girl than in any physical delight, or desire for the person who gave it to me.
Sometimes she tried to talk to me. “So this is the monster’s lair. I have to be honest, I’m a little disappointed. I thought it would look like something from Buffy or Aliens.” Another time: “You know that flower you gave me? I forgot to put it in water for like two days and it still hasn’t died.” I never took the conversational bait. If Donna thought my behavior strange, she didn’t say anything.
20.2.5 - my guess: Noah becomes the Monster
“You know, I didn’t realize how lonely I was until I wasn’t anymore.
but it’s hard to live with a depressed person. The depression takes up physical space, swells and seeps under closed doors. It wafts between rooms like poison gas, settling over the house in a fog.
“I don’t get to leave this room,” she said. “I have a brain as big as Saturn, but I go to community college because of a chemical imbalance. I’m stuck in a conservative concrete hell, decaying inside and justifying my choices to a C-average narcissist with mommy issues. So please, hear me before you spout any more nonsense about my well-being: I’d be fucking fine if you would fuck off and leave me the fuck alone.”
Kierkegaard said (I think) that society has always put a taboo on suicide because when a person kills herself, the people around said person start to question the value of their own lives, and that makes them uncomfortable.
They don’t tell the whole story. Only the old tragedies tell the truth. Beowulf triumphs over Grendel and his mother, only to fall fighting a dragon. Gilgamesh loses his best friend. Achilles, too. Everyone dies in Hamlet. This is the whole truth.
There are, however, good stopping places. I made the mistake of traveling past mine, is all. I’m like spoiled milk stuck in the jug. I need to pour myself out and move on. I need to be free to move through eternity and infinity,
We can’t make new happiness past a certain point, but we can linger in past joy forever, perfectly captured with the rememberer’s eye.
Love Always, Eunice
Nvm about last theory; new one: wolf is Eunice; other wolves are other people outside of time. (Red hair too)
reading fantasy fiction not written by C. S. Lewis,
Lol
Bad things happen all the time. People get hurt. People die. And if they die without Christ in their hearts, they’re sentenced to a pit of never-ending pain and suffering.”
I led them to the miniature golf course out back and kept score while they putted and talked shit. Kyle slipped into the flow of the conversation without apparent effort, and it occurred to me how little time I’d spent in the company of men. Although I shared the same basic biology, they felt like a foreign species. Boastful, loud, and rambunctious, even these fat, aging men remained proud and confident, as though they owned the world. Where did that confidence originate? Also, where did they find their innate sense of brotherhood?
I yanked the drawing out of my back pocket and unfolded it for them to see. “Do any of you recognize this?”
This book is pretty dumb, because the characters are so, so dumb, and they shouldnt even be. He waits more than a decade to confront his family about The Monster, and when he finally does, he does it like that - with two strangers in the room who are obviously confused and unrelated to said huge topic? Noah is literally a constant moron - a moron beyond reasoning.
The smile bloomed. “It’s been a long time,” she said. She pressed a hand to the name tag on her chest: HI, MY NAME IS BRIN.
Ridiculous coincidence
Her gaze dropped, and I felt a brutal satisfaction at this small cruelty. Fuck her.
Religion—especially the weird kind, which is what I had—is a hard thing to get out from under. It can talk you into all sorts of stupid, cruel behavior. It can make you afraid of yourself, and instead of dealing with that, I made it Eunice’s problem.”
“I want to go to the zoo,” Dennis said. Caroline looked up from her book. “Are you joking? Why would you want to visit animal prison?”
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, with a defiant glare. I didn’t argue, but waited. The indignation gradually bled out of her face. “For a little while, Mom seemed so happy—happier than I’ve ever seen her—but then one day she turned mean. Like whatever we said or did was the wrong thing. And Dad—she was awful to him. She called him weak, and a coward, and said she should never have married him. She did it in front of me and Dennis, like she didn’t care if we heard. And Dad hunched his shoulders and took it until she was done.”
but also of me. Smart and scared
"Smart"
Okay bud
The Bloody Chamber, Ghost Story, The Ceremonies, and Memnoch the Devil.
“If this thing was grooming you, the sex was just another part of it,” Sarah said, voice gentle. “You were manipulated. It’s not your fault.”
