T.E. Grau > T.E.'s Quotes

“But the stillness was the sleep of swords.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“He never fell,
never slipped back,
never flew.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown”
― H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

“Q: Do you have any advice for upcoming writers who want to pen weird stories?

A: READ, damn it. Fill your brain to the bursting point with the good stuff, starting with writers that you truly enjoy, and then work your way backward and outward, reading those writers who inspired the writers you love best. That was my path as far as Weird/Horror Fiction, starting with Lovecraft, and then working my way backward/outward on the Weird Fiction spiderweb. And don’t limit your reading. Read it all, especially non-fiction and various news outlets. You’d be surprised by how many of my story ideas were born while listening to NPR, perusing a blog, or paging through Vanity Fair.

Once you have your fuel squared away, just write what you love, in whatever style and genre. You’ll never have fun being someone you’re not, so be yourself. When a singer opens their mouth, what comes out is what comes out.

Also, don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk away. Writing isn’t for everyone, and that’s totally fine. One doesn’t need to be a writer to enjoy being a reader and overall fan of genre or wider fiction.”
― T.E. Grau

“the searing knife slowly sawing through his guts, screaming for a bullet but settling for wine.”
― T.E. Grau, The Nameless Dark: A Collection

“An author, whether good or bad, or between both, is an animal whom every body is privileged to attack: for though all are not able to write books, all conceive themselves able to judge them.”
― Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“To my mind, a well-developed sense of humor is the surest indication of a person's humanity, no matter how black and bitter that humor may be.”
― Thomas Ligotti

“The sinister, the terrible never deceive: the state in which they leave us is always one of enlightenment. And only this condition of vicious insight allows us a full grasp of the world, all things considered, just as a frigid melancholy grants us full possession of ourselves. We may hide from horror only in the heart of horror. (“The Medusa”)”
― Thomas Ligotti

“Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.”
― Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom

“Confidence pumped to the level of giving zero fucks was portable, at least in theory.”
― T.E. Grau, They Don't Come Home Anymore

“I do not love men: I love what devours them.”
― André Gide, Prometheus Illbound

“Some people say the white house on the hill was once a place where old, rich people lived after they retired from owning the industry, the land, the laws, our houses, our town, us.”
― Adam Nevill, Before You Sleep: Three Horrors

“For me the world has always been more of a puppet show. But when one looks behind the curtain and traces the strings upward he finds they terminate in the hands of yet other puppets, themselves with their own strings which trace upward in turn, and so on. In my own life I saw these strings whose origins were endless enact the deaths of great men in violence and madness. Enact the ruin of a nation.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had no meaning. For loneliness assumed the absence of other people, and the solitude she found in that desperate terrain had never admitted the possibility of other people. She wept then. Tears for the deaths of the littlest things: the castaway shoes of children; broken stems of marsh grass battered and drowned by the sea; prom photographs of dead women she never knew; wedding rings in pawnshop windows; the tiny bodies of Cornish hens in a nest of rice.”
― Toni Morrison, Sula

“She would've been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
― Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

“I should have been a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”
― T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Other Poems

“In a moment of instant clarity, Gary realized that he was about to see exactly what his insides were made of. And he wasn’t afraid. He was curious.”
― T.E. Grau, The Nameless Dark: A Collection

“what matters most is how well you walk through the fire”
― Charles Bukowski

“For every moment of triumph, for every instance of beauty, many souls must be trampled.”
― Hunter S. Thompson