Christmas and Other Horrors Quotes

“Maybe secrets, and silence, were a part of the key to becoming an adult, but they also took something away.”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology

“All money ain’t good money,” Mom said, “but bad money can be put to good use.”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology

“All truths are negotiable, mother, I might have replied, had I truly wished to hurt her. Even when we don’t want them to be.”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology

“What inspired this story? Exhaustion, really. Sometimes, I get tired. Sometimes, I look at the world and all the malice in it, all the hatred running unchecked, all the pain that exists and the joy some people take in causing hurt, and I wonder if we deserve seeing another sunrise, another spring. Sometimes, I wonder if it’s easier to stop fighting and keep my head down, to focus instead on surviving. But then I think about how happy it’d make those bastards for me to lay down and die, and I get up again, ready to upset them with my existence.”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology

“Had it always ached like this to move? Had her joints always felt so stiff? She was sure it was yesterday when she could do cartwheels without restriction, tumbling through green grass, unafraid of whether that would bring about consequences in the morning. Where had she misplaced that effortlessly limber version of her?”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology

“By then, Johnny was in college in lily-white Iowa on a full academic scholarship, never needing a cent from Grandmother’s estate—and the story of his uncle’s disappearance didn’t sit right.”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology

“The fastest way to the other side of the worst is through.”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology

“Something besides familial obligation draws us back to the ancestral sod. Something not so easily explained.”
― Ellen Datlow, Christmas and Other Horrors: A Winter Solstice Anthology