The Troop Quotes

“The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“How could you hide from a murderer who lives under your skin?”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“It came down to that flexibility of a person’s mind. An ability to withstand horrors and snap back, like a fresh elastic band. A flinty mind shattered. In this way, he was glad not to be an adult. A grown-up’s mind—even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim—lacked that elasticity. The world had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity. Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child—leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. Or maybe there is: you just grow up. And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed . . . well, they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening. That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“They’d made a pact to be friends forever, but forever could be so, so brief.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“You hold on to life until it gets ripped away from you. Even if it gets ripped away in pieces. You just hold on.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man?

Edgerton asks me with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris.

It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it’s hopeless. It’s like the end is always there, you can’t escape it, but things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything’s been stripped away. Their bodies and happiness and hope.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it's hopeless. It's like the end is always there, you can't escape it. But things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything's been stripped away, their bodies and happiness and hope. Things just don't know when to die, I wish they did. I wish my friends had known that, sort of anyway. But I'm glad they tried, that's part of being human right? Part of being any living thing. You hold onto life until it gets ripped away from you, even if it gets ripped away in pieces, you just hold on.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That's what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the "right people," whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child-leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement's light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There's no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears.
Or maybe there is: you just grow up.
And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things-but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed... well, they can't summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don't believe it could be happening.
That's what's different about kid: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“The dividing line between genius and insanity is very thin and quite permeable—which is why so many geniuses descend into madness.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Adults are obsolete children.” —DR. SEUSS”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction.

A person profited nothing from being good.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“They say cockroaches will be the last things left on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Don't believe it. The last thing on earth will be a worm in the guts of those cockroaches, sucking them dry.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people the love they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“If there was one thing he wanted to tell his lost friends, it was that lots of adults didn’t have a goddamn clue. It was one of the sadder facts he’d had to come to grips with. Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“The past had a perfection that the future could never hold”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Information isn’t always power. Information can do harm just as easily as ignorance.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“It doesn’t really look like a bear,” Max said one night. “Why should it?” Ephraim said, sounding angry. “That’s humans trying to, like, organize the stars to our liking. You think the Big Guy, the Grand Creator, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever said: Oh, guess I’d better make these flaming balls of gas look exactly like a bear or a fucking spoon so those stupid goons on rock 5,079 don’t get confused?” He lip-farted. “Ohyeahriiiight,”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“I thought: This is how it COULD be. If I wasn’t ME. If I existed in a different body, an acceptable body, a body everyone loved. If I didn’t live in North Point, where I’m like this train on rails: I know where I’m going, hate it, but can’t change course. This was who I could’ve been if the ball had bounced just a bit differently, you know?”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“The night’s silence stretched over the immensity of the ocean—an impossibly quiet vista that stirred fear in Max’s heart. Would death be like that: endless liquid silence?”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“If you call the tune, you also have to pay the piper when he begs his due.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“You wanted to play King Shit, Kent. Well, you played it. Now wear your crown of turds.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“He couldn't get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded—wormed—into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“His eyes were miserably bright and aware, bulging with pure shock and horror: the eyes of a little boy who’d come face-to-face with the nameless horror lurking under his bed.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop