Keith > Keith's Quotes

“WE BEGIN WITH THE TROUBLE, but where does the trouble begin? My uncle takes a pistol and blows his brains out.”
― Kyle Minor, Praying Drunk: Stories

“This place called heaven, this realm of perfection and life everlasting. When it comes down to it, nobody ever wants to go there. Now isn’t that strange? I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve seen faith fall apart at the moment of death. I’ve seen people fight it in every way how. I’ve seen the terror in their eyes. The scratching, the squirming. If god is life ever after then why is it nobody ever wants to go to him and meet him?”
― Paul Lynch, Red Sky in Morning

“I spend a lot of time on my own thinking betwixt me and the saddle and I ain’t come up with much but I did come up with this—the difference between man and beast is we’re able to imagine the future and they’re not. But what makes us no better than em is we cain’t predict it.”
― Paul Lynch, Red Sky in Morning

“But unlike the person with exquisite taste in painting or perfume, the movie nerd is classless as well. Grasping the genius of Russ Meyer or George Romero or Herschell Gordon Lewis carries no cultural cachet and gets no one laid, believe me.”
― David Gordon, Mystery Girl

“Saying sorry was fine, but tears were better. This is a country of moral failures, not simple mistakes. But Mom only said, – I didn’t mean to fight.”
― Victor LaValle, The Ecstatic

“She was in college, a time of optimistic fascism when it seems that all the world needs is one more rally.”
― Victor LaValle, The Ecstatic

“Hacked to pieces by a band of hillbilly satanists” hadn’t ever made my list of imagined ways of getting rubbed out—and as the Samurai warriors of yore meditated on a thousand demises, I too had imagined a whole lot of ways of kicking. Helios Augustus’s candle flame flickered in the black opening. He”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“Cliché’s contain all truth,”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“and low-life cable network producers, who have never had a thought in their heads that did not come from something else they saw on cable television, are so unthreatened by me that they feel safe stealing my stuff and claiming to have had sudden strokes of genius.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“writing about drugs is like that though, isn't it? You can just tell when someone is writing about drugs and they've never really done them. It screams out at you. That's something where I believe you have to have been there to really get it, y'know?”
― Irvine Welsh

“And the justice in this world is that you don’t have to break legs because somebody’s broken yours.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“It’s strange how you’re sometimes forced to assume an unsympathetic view of yourself through borrowed eyes.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Songs of a Dead Dreamer

“Sarcasm is just anger.” “You’re an idiot.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“Charles Snow had been as spiritually curious as a fence post, and Pete doubted that his father had ever changed in any meaningful way, even after Pete’s mother died. But there was an aptness to his late conversion, as though he always knew that at the end of his life he’d have to do something to avoid going to hell.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“did I do that?” She reached over and took two cigarettes from the pack and lit one for him and handed it to him and then one for herself. She got out of the bed and walked naked into the hall and returned with a bottle. He felt the force of this uncanny tableau. As though they had no child. As though this were a different version of things. He took a small comfort that somewhere such an iteration as this one existed, where Rachel had never been born and the only damage he and Beth did was to each other. “I was already gone,” Pete said.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“...the world is a blade and dread is hope cut open and spread inside out.”
― Smith Henderson, Fourth of July Creek

“I thought about what my mom always said about this part of Texas, “Oh Godforsaken land. I don’t know why anybody would want to live out here.”
― Scott McClanahan, The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. I

“Something Rich and Strange

She was less of what she had been, the blue rubbed from her eyes, flesh freed from the chandelier of bone. He touched what once had been a hand. The river whispered to him that it would not be long now.”
― Ron Rash, Nothing Gold Can Stay: Stories

“The past was a bridge that looked solid and sturdy, but once you were on it, you saw that it extended only far enough to strand you, to suspend you between loss and longing with nowhere to go at all.”
― Bret Anthony Johnston, Remember Me Like This

“When humans’ nerves detect big and small stimuli at the same time, they ignore the smaller one.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“A wallet shows a person’s personality and lifestyle. Just like a cell phone, it is at the center, forming the nucleus of the owner’s secrets, everything he carries on him.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“I thought about how this banknote had witnessed a moment of each one of those people’s lives. Maybe it had been at the scene of a murder, then passed from the murderer to a shopkeeper somewhere, then to a good person somewhere else.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“But obviously if there was no concept of ownership there’d be no concept of stealing, would there? As long as there’s one starving child in the world, all property is theft.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“Why does the subconscious mind make people steal? Why does it have to be stealing? Don’t you think it’s something deep-rooted in our nature?”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“Fate is like the relationship between the strong and the weak, don’t you think? Look at religion, for example. The Israelites, who worshipped Jehovah—why were they afraid of him? Because their god was powerful, that’s why. Everyone who believes in gods fears them to some extent.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“In this life, the proper way of living is to make use of both joy and suffering. They are both merely stimuli that the world presents to us. So by blending them skillfully within you, you can use them in a completely different way. If you want to be steeped in evil, you mustn’t forget good.”
― Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief

“Did you know everyone thinks that one day they might be a millionaire? Like that’s a lot of money. They have no idea. They don’t want to be a superhero. They just want to be like me.”
― Anonymous

“From my own experience, I can tell you that there are mornings when you sit down at the typewriter and knock out three pages in forty-five minutes, and you look at yourself in the toaster over breakfast and your head’s all misshapen and pointy, and you say, “Son, you were born with talent.”
― Pete Dexter, Paper Trails: True Stories of Confusion, Mindless Violence, and Forbidden Desires, a Surprising Number of Which Are Not About Marriage

“You can smell it, too. Death. Dying. Decay. The sky is falling, the sky is dying, the sky is dead.”
― Josh Malerman, Bird Box

“Nobody wants to come to the movies and see an ugly popcorn girl.”
― Anonymous