The Great Night Quotes

“If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder.

"I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“Maybe I'm too crazy to be in a relationship," Henry said, which was his familiar response to Bobby's familiar discourse about the future. It felt like a grown-up thing to say, and like a difficult concession, and what he meant by it was I am trying as hard as I can and it's not enough for you or even Why can't my weak eccentricities be adorable to you, as yours are to me? But Bobby always heard it as a conversation stopper, childish and easy and glib.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“It was something he would figure out only after Bobby dumped him: that his imagination was what made the real world, and real people, only barely palatable for him.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“He liked to think that he tolerated more strangeness than most people, because he knew from experience that life was generally much stranger than most folks could imagine.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“She was doing just what it looked like she was doing, lying about, half-awake and half-asleep, passing the time and waiting for something to change. Because it seemed very clear to her, in those first few days, that what she felt was so intolerable that it couldn't possibly last, and if she did nothing to distract herself from it, she'd use it up, and then she'd be able to get up, and move about, and care once again about her duties to her people, about her constitutional obligations to dancing and singing and feasting and praising the movements of the stars. She didn't consider at all--she didn't dare to consider--that the sources of grief inside her might be inexhaustible.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“She had spent the majority of her days in some sort of a tizzy and had developed over the course of her life a tizzy repertoire of abundant variety, from the black depressive tizzy to the anxious weepy tizzy to the more traditional furious tizzy, which almost always involved projectiles.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“What she had done over the past year had required an equivalent expenditure of energy to a year-long sprint, and when she thought of it that way it was obviously an unreasonable thing to do. Remaining sane--clinging and grasping at it, seeking to please a propriety constructed by people whose boyfriends had never killed themselves--was in fact the most insane thing she could have done, and anyone properly equipped by the right kind of experience would understand that.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“The difference, she decided, was that now there was something to be done. Hell would be raised, and Oberon would come or not, but at least there would be no more idle tears. The night would end in joy or ruin, and somehow that was easier to abide than an endless, static grief.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“He never got a really proper look at them, but the situation told him it must be a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night

“He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.”
― Chris Adrian, The Great Night