Nod Quotes

“Someone once said that we get more difficult to love with each passing year because, over time, our histories grow so tangled that newcomers can no longer bushwhack their way into the thicketed and overgrown depths of our hearts.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Hell is time, isn’t that obvious? Take your greatest pleasure or your greatest fantasy and let it come continuously true—for a day, a week, a year, a decade. And that’s hell.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“I think now that if all eight billion of us had just shut off the lights and gone to bed that night and left it alone we’d have all slept and the chalice would have passed us by. But let’s be real. Whoever leaves anything alone? Life’s a scab, and it’s our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“There’s a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Life's a scab, and it's our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Nobody says these things—it’s against the rules—but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love. Most”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“And speaking of Escher, it’s worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call ‘reality’ there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact—a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Children are the eternal, silent witnesses to every human sin, and the more we tatter their purity, the more we extol the clean white blouses of ‘innocence’.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn’t that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there’s never the slightest guarantee that we’ll wake the next morning. Every little cat nap is a potential game-ender. So why fear death when we are happy and even eager to make that leap of faith each and every night of our lives?”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Love a lie. But a real lie, a true lie.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“But as it turns out, love doesn’t set us free—love keeps standing outside the jail on an endless candlelight vigil. So love? Yes, love was pain as well. Especially love.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“didn’t have a lot of time for people; you could say I had my reservations about the species. Maybe I’d spent too much time in the forest of unspoken words to emerge with any confidence in my fellow man.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“It reminds me of poets, before all this—how the sensitive souls who submitted their work to literary journals outnumbered those who read those same publications by a margin of about ten to one. Everyone wanting to be heard; no one interested in listening.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“What we used to blithely call ‘wasting time’ was actually a euphemism for the tenement architecture of our lives; there wasn’t an ounce of waste in a ton of those lost hours. Proof of this could be seen in the fact that even as we imagined we were killing time with movies and phone calls, careers and frozen pizzas, time was slowly but surely killing us. But who knew? It”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Sartre, expanding on Descartes, wrote that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“After all, what were seashells but empty coffins? What were starfish on the beach but bloated corpses, rotting in an alien environment?”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“can still hear the contempt in her voice. At times everyone wonders how deeply buried contempt is beneath the surface of their friends’ and lovers’ smiles; most of us suspect—accurately, I believe—that it lies in a shallow grave, gasping for breath beneath a damp mulch of manners and restraint.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“If, during any one of a million previous nights, a giant asteroid had smashed the Earth into gravel while we all slept, would it have mattered? With no one left to mourn the wreckage, one could even argue that it wouldn’t be a bad way to end things at all: egalitarian if nothing else. I even thought of a scene in Star Wars where Princess Leia receives news that her home world has been destroyed by Darth Vader’s Death Star. She throws a hairy fit, but two scenes later, she’s back to flirting with Han Solo.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“That's what you do when you run out of options: you go home.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“It was the same before, when people would warn about the inevitability of environmental destruction (now looking to be reversed, assuming too many more nukes don’t go off before they rust away). Conserve, conserve, they’d whinny, knowing full well that their anaemic efforts would never make an ounce of difference. For myself, I’d always muttered, consume, consume, reasoning that the sooner we hit the crisis point, the sooner we’d be forced to stop shitting where we ate.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain—all of it—all along.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“What else do I see? Packs of dogs, heads hovering low, roam the periphery of things. The long-standing human-canine alliance has been irretrievably severed, I’m sincerely sorry to report—the gnawed bones and matted chunks of hair scattered along the shores of Lost Lagoon testify to this. It’s sad, but then again those plump collies and German shepherds don’t seem too weighed down by nostalgia for bone-shaped vegan treats and belly rubs from the opposably-thumbed as they wander about, licking their chops. Anyway, it’s not their fault. We’re the ones who broke the deal.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“How hard would it have been to design barriers that would have made it impossible for people to jump or fall onto the tracks? But we hadn't bothered; we'd been willing to accept a little blood for the sake of our economical and efficient train gods.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Indeed, this was the first thing l'd seen affect her in any way, despite the fact that she’d already seen the full menu of 'things no child should ever see—but which, we adults conveniently forget, they actually see all the time. Children are the eternal, silent witnesses to every human sin, and the more we tatter their purity, the more we extol the clean white blouses of 'innocence.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“…Sartre, expanding on Descartes, wrote that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other. From that meeting of the eyes, everything else in our fragile human universes blossomed forth. But! Think of how easily human status is taken away—by war, by hospitals, by arguments about whose turn it is to take out the recycling. How easily we can turn people into things. And now Tanya had turned me into a thing.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Were statues, I wondered, filled with love? Were they enchanted men and women, jaws hanging slack, who'd been flash-frozen by beauty? Had they seen something that had brought their world to a standstill? Were they beings somehow beyond us, beyond our grasping, snapping little world, transfixed by infinity?”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Maybe I’d spent too much time in the forest of unspoken words to emerge with any confidence in my fellow man.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain—all of it—all along. Rage was pain, hate was pain, pride was pain, lust was pain. All that's different now is that where pain used to have the luxury of being a bit of a drama queen and playing dress up, now it stands out there on the corner of Birchin Lane, quivering and naked.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Everyone wanting to be heard; no one interested in listening.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod