S.R. Hughes > S.R.'s Quotes

“Deep, deep down, a truth beneath every tale. Soon, too soon, a monster at the end of every story.”
― S.R. Hughes, The War Beneath

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.”
― Charles Bukowski

“I'll take Cthulhu over you devils any day.”
― Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

“The world is made up of rituals. From the way you brush your teeth to how you show obeisance during religious ceremonies, it’s an endless list of interlocking behaviours seared into your unconscious self, charms against the madness of reality.”
― Cassandra Khaw, Food of the Gods

“It was funny how little justice seemed to come in the wake of justice being done. It was funny how often the word “funny” described horrors that couldn’t be screamed away.”
― S.R. Hughes, The War Beneath

“For every man there exists bait he cannot resist swallowing.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.”
― Neil Gaiman , The Sandman, Vol. 4: Season of Mists

“well, death says, as he walks by, I'm going to get you anyhow no matter what you've been: writer, cab-driver, pimp, butcher, sky-diver, I'm going to get you”
― Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems

“People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.”
― James Baldwin

“This maybe the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it—that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales from a Strange Time

“The straw that breaks the camel's back always looks light enough, until it lands.”
― Edgar Cantero, Meddling Kids

“I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“The street finds its own uses for things.”
― William Gibson

“In folktales a vampire couldn’t enter your home unless you invited him in. Without your consent the beast could never cross your threshold. Well, what do you think your computer is? Your phone? You live inside those devices so those devices are your homes. But at least a home, a physical building, has a door you can shut, windows you can latch. Technology has no locked doors.”
― Victor LaValle, The Changeling

“This is what happens, of course: men get lost, men vanish, men are erased and reborn.”
― Doug Dorst, S.

“People don’t realize how easy life is to change. You just get on the bus.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!”
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-1967

“We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“It’s not that fact of him telling me he’s not going to kill me that assures me I’ve got some time to breathe. Predo could look me in the eye and tell me whiskey’s good and cigarettes are better and I’d still need a drink and a Lucky to believe he’s not lying. The man breeds lies. He spawns them asexually, with no need for any assistance. He exhales and lies fill the air. Alone in a room, he mutters lies to himself to keep from falling into the trap of truth-telling. In the day, sleeping in his bed, deep in the safest heart of Coalition headquarters, he dreams in lies. The better to keep his left hand from knowing what betrayals his right has planned.

Stretched on the rack and burned with hot irons, Dexter Predo will be in no danger of revealing the truth. Living so far beyond its borders.”
― Charlie Huston, Every Last Drop

“Voodou isn’t like that. It isn’t concerned with notions of salvation and transcendence. What it’s about is getting things done. You follow me? In out system, there are many gods, spirits. Part of one big family, with all the virtues, all the vices. There’s a ritual tradition of communal manifestation, understand? Voodou says, there’s a God, sure, Gran Met, but He’s big, too big and too far away to worry Himself if your ass is poor, or you can’t get laid. Come on, man, you know how this works, it’s street religion, came out of dirt poor places a million years ago. Voodou’s like the street. Some duster chops out your sister, you don’t go camp on the Yakuza’s doorstep, do you? No way. You go to somebody, though, who can get the thing done. Right?”
― William Gibson, Count Zero

“Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how extremely expensive it is to be poor.”
― James Baldwin

“Mortal fear is as crucial a thing to our lives as love. It cuts to the core of our being and shows us what we are. Will you step back and cover your eyes? Or will you have the strength to walk to the precipice and look out?”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“No sympathy for the devil; keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride...and if it occasionally gets a little heavier than what you had in mind, well...maybe chalk it up to forced consciousness expansion: Tune in, freak out, get beaten.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream

“What begins at the water shall end there, and what ends there shall once more begin. Words are a gift to the dead and a warning to the living.”
― Doug Dorst, S.

“Sovereign. Deadly. Perfect.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“So we shall let the reader answer this question for himself: who is the happier man, he who has braved the storm of life and lived or he who has stayed securely on shore and merely existed?”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.”
― William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer

“You get what anybody gets - you get a lifetime.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 1: Preludes & Nocturnes