North American Lake Monsters Quotes

“She’s like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those people goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“A ghost is something that fills a hole inside you, where you lost something. It's a memory. Sometimes it can be painful, and sometimes it can be scary. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the ghost ends and real life begins.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He imagined the room bathed in blood, himself striding through it, a raven amongst the carcasses. Strutting like any carrion king.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He used to feel smaller than them, less significant, as if he’d been born without some essential gene to make him acceptable to other people.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“When she looked at him again she had raised windows for eyes, with curtains blowing out of them, framing a yellow-lit room. Below them, her face declined in wet shingles, flowing with little rivulets of rainwater.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Jeremy supposed that a Christmas party full of elementary school professionals might be the worst place in the world. He would drift among them helplessly, like a grizzly bear in a roomful of children, expected not to eat anyone.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Four days ago: he'd stood on the front porch of his home in the deep blue hollow of early morning, watching the waters of the Gulf roll onto the beach. It was his favorite time of day: that sweet, lonesome hinge between darkness and daylight, when he could pretend he was alone in the world and free to take it on his own terms.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He felt the guilt move inside of him, huge but seemingly distant, like a whale passing beneath a boat.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“They moved roughly, urgently, breathing in the musk of each other, breathing in too the smell of the pines and the lake and the dead monster, this last growing in power until it occluded the others, until it filled his sinuses, his head, his body, until it seemed nothing existed except that smell and the awful thing that made it, until it seemed he was its source, the wellspring of all the foulness of the earth, and when he spent himself into her he thought for a wretched moment that he had somehow injected it with the possibility of new life.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“She’s so afraid,” Alex said after she retreated from view. “You know why?” “Um, because you’re big and scary?” “Because she already knows about possibilities. Long as you know there are options in life, you get scared of choosing the wrong one.” Toni leaned away from him and gave him a mistrustful smile. “Okay, Einstein. Easy with the philosophy.” “No, really. She’s like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those people goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are. She’s afraid of what she’ll lose by coming out to see me. Of who she’ll never get to be.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Long as you know there are options in life, you get scared of choosing the wrong one. ... She's like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those people goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“I think I had meant to make everything well again, until my victim turned her face, bleary and beautiful with sleep and full of trust, towards me. She had forgotten the quarrel, and I found even in her forgetfulness a new cause. How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us . . .” Graham Greene, The End of the Affair”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“It had changed since this morning. It actually was shedding light, for one thing, though it was a dim phosphorescence, the result of some strange fungus or bacterium running amuck through its innards. The creature looked like some ghastly oversized nightlight. The gash that was either a mouth or a wound had borne fruit: a weird and vibrant flora spilled from it like fruit from a cornucopia, pale protuberances with growths like outstretched arms listing this way and that, a dozen vegetable christs. Life abounded here: small chitinous animals hurried busily to and fro, conducting their miserable business in tunnels and passageways in the body, provided for them by nature or their own savage industry; a cloud of insects, drunk on the very perfume which had driven him into fits, alternately settling on its carcass and lifting away again in graceful curtains, like wind blowing through a wheatfield.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He looks up at the sky--and there, in the thunderheads, he finds something familiar.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He imagined the sky dissolving to reveal the hard vault of stars, the galaxy turning above him like a cog in a vast, unknowable engine. And behind it all, the emptiness into which men cast their prayers. It occurred to him that he could leave now, walk out into the long twilight and keep going until the earth opened beneath him and he found himself descending strange stairs, while the world around him broke silently into snow, and into night.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He started down the highway, walking along the edge of stopped traffic. He felt the weightlessness of mercy. He was a striding Christ. Sounds filtered through to him: people yelling and pleading; footsteps splashing through the rain; a distant, stranded siren. From somewhere behind him a man’s sob, weird and ululating, rose above the wreckage and disappeared into the sky, a flaming rag.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Dodger smelled the way dogs do, musky and of the earth, and he sighed with the abiding patience of his kind.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters