Bad Brains Quotes

“Each man kills the thing he loves, for the thing he loves more.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“For Russell it was more than strictly physical, it was metaphysical, both key and path, believing with the same certain rapture that his father’s epilepsy had been such as well; like the men who built the pyramids, like the men who called from clay into motionless life the perpetual brood of the Sphinx; like Dostoyevski’s Idiot, fire at brief moments, the flare and passion mistaken by the cloddish outer world as idiocy; as insanity. But instead, the light within. Burning. Burning. Wreaking with a fury like the hurricane of truth itself, showing him: what. How to see.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“Their talk ran with its own rhythm, counterpoint not to the road itself or its brute miles and markers but the sensation of motion; travel as its own reward, a sense of suspension, of being outside the time heeded and served by others, bound only by that special timelessness begotten solely by travel without schedules or constraints.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“there were always stories; people had to talk. Even if they were dying. Maybe the tongue was the last to go.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“Intubated, shaking from a combination of hunger and sheer weakness, still he understood, now, not all the words but most, not every nuance but every other. The comfort of this was indescribable; but what a thin line he had been walking, all along, the same line everyone took for granted, the ability to simply understand. When his head stopped hurting like a motherfucker he was certainly going to do some thinking about it.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“I’m going to work awhile,” Austen said, still careful to see nothing, reaching for his sketches, realizing with sudden puzzlement that there were more of them than he recalled completing, there were many, many sketches, he sifted faster and more roughly, first the sphinxes and then men with the hindquarters and genitals of dogs, women with alligator heads, children plucking tunes on the bones of their mothers with the spines of dead fish in their hair, and then things both wilder and less definable, things that resisted all possible categorization, things that might have come from places where the elements are blood and acid, where fire is air and air is a trustless medium to be molded or shrunk or banished by whim; he had no memory of any of these creatures, none of them with their small tilted eyes and smiling chops, none.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“When he came back to the car he glanced wary to the backseat, but Austen had curled fetal at his approach, had curled like those bugs they used to call cannonballs that became tiny spheres when you touched them. When they were scared.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“I am so tired of seeing it. I am so tired of being sick. I am so afraid of being crazy.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“Perhaps it was the lack itself, imperfectly perceived, that had driven Emily away, had brought doubly upon him the despair of emptiness and the banal certainty of despair avoided, how fear the void when the void is where you live?”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“color is burning black. Elongation, fatal stretch, where your head is banded like a screaming monkey’s, the place where every toolbox is empty, where the only tool is the caveman clench and hollow of pain and anger and the desire so strong it breaks the hands that use it, yes. Beyond it is work. Beyond it is the limbic whine, soul’s heart beating in the rain that is always silver, silver and no color at all. Where pain is currency, and work is more than work. Where every real creator wants to be.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains