Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“[Horror fiction] shows us that the control we believe we have is purely illusory, and that every moment we teeter on chaos and oblivion.”
― Clive Barker

“I don't want to see another church; the smell of the places makes me sick. Stale incense, old sweat, and lies...

"In the Hills, the Cities”
― Clive Barker, Books of Blood: Volume One

“You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal.”
― Joyce Carol Oates

“Taking the law into your own hands, fuck what's wrong with that?”
― Joyce Carol Oates, Rape: A Love Story

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“You know, I think the main purpose of the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps is to get poor Americans into clean, pressed, unpatched clothes, so rich Americans can stand to look at them.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“What gets me most about these people, Daddy, isn't how ignorant they are, or how much they drink. It's the way they have of thinking that everything nice in the world is a gift to the poor people from them or their ancestors. The first afternoon I was here, Mrs. Buntline made me come out on the back porch and look at the sunset. So I did, and I said I liked it very much, but she kept waiting for me to say something else. I couldn't think of what I was supposed to say, so I said what seemed like a dumb thing. "Thank you very much," I said. That is exactly what she was waiting for. "You're entirely welcome," she said. I have since thanked her for the ocean, the moon, the stars in the sky, and the United States Constitution.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“Eliot did to the word love what the Russians did to the word democracy. If Eliot is going to love everybody, no matter what they are, no matter what they do, then those of us who love particular people for particular reasons had better find ourselves a new word." He looked at an oil painting of his deceased wife. "For instance- I loved her more than I love our garbage collector, which makes me guilty of the most unspeakable of modern crimes: Dis-crim-i-nay-tion.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next—if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions—you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“Farewells can be shattering, but returns are surely worse. Solid flesh can never live up to the bright shadow cast by its absence. Time and distance blur the edges; then suddenly the beloved has arrived, and it's noon with its merciless light, and every spot and pore and wrinkle and bristle stands clear.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

“If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale

“From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale

“At least," Mother said, "that's the story Aunt Esther tells."
"What do you mean?" I asked. "Isn't it true?"
"Stories are never 'true'," Mother said. "But they may, almost by accident, contain 'truth'. Sometimes.”
― Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale

“My mother is a fish.”
― William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying