The Cipher Quotes

“If I could have broken his neck I would have, just for the pleasure of the silence after the snap.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Gone as usual in the morning, and me left behind and naked, inner thighs lightly scaled with the dried spoor of our lovemaking: she liked to stay on top afterward and let the juice run down, and I liked whatever she liked. Imagining in the shower that I could smell her still, the angular scent of those secret bones, had she always smelled so fierce and so good? Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don’t think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“there is such peace in helplessness,”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right? Call the specialist when you do. You don’t even have to call, chances are I’ll already be there, you’ve just overlooked me because I’m in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I’ve stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight. Beside”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Making no living as a card-carrying poet had accustomed me to a philosophy that made minimalism seem lavish, I had lived like a cockroach for so long that a full tank, a full refrigerator were no longer even desirable: I mean, what would I do with it all?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Maddeningly beautiful. and faint as an insect choir, like standing in the dark and glimpsing—the barest peripheral, an image behind your eyelids—the passing of your one desire, close enough to nuzzle if you could only fix its motion, see it all the way.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“The worst wounds are internal, I should have known that from my own experience, but I’m the type of guy who doesn’t learn.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“You always think you’d like it if the Twilight Zone came true. You can forget that shit.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“You can get used to being wrong all the time; it takes all the responsibility out of things.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“This is what’s supposed to happen, don’t you know that? Don’t you understand anything?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I can take a hint, but I can’t live with it.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“A calmness I had not felt for days, weeks, drifted warmly over me; I felt almost good. Must be the solitude, certainly a rare commodity these days. The thrum became a lullaby, God knew I needed rest. Not just sleep but rest, a breathing space, a place in which to forget.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“and still more to a point that, oh God, I had never imagined there could be so much pain in all the world, certainly not contained in the stupid simple vessel of my body, my body,”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Yes, of course, it was the naughty Funhole back of everything, but who got the blame: the box? Or Pandora?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“one of my rare displays of temper but it pissed me off, it truly did, to wake after such a night to find the palace guard, armed with stupidity and questions,”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Irresistible force and immovable object, yes sir, that is my baby.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Dave was even moved to crack a joke, something about the superrealists who froze to death when they went to the drive-in to see CLOSED FOR WINTER. Imagine”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“She shook her head, the pessimism of a woman who knows.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Nobody said much but there was still, like smoke in the air, a feeling of fragile camaraderie; foxhole love. Funhole love.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“cried a long time, past pain until I felt so empty nothing hurt, nothing anywhere, if I had died I could not have felt more husked. A walking depletion.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right? Call the specialist when you do. You don’t even have to call, chances are I’ll already be there, you’ve just overlooked me because I’m in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I’ve stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Skid and drift, that was me and the way I lived my life, foolish, hopeless, irredeemable, a broom-closet hellhole my epiphany, my one true love a woman who had never come close to loving me, even on my best days, her best days, this woman my lover now again in what was at most a terminal waste of time. Ah God, the happy hells I can create, you too, all of us. Even Nakota. We are all our worst best friends. Don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“But what she failed to notice, or maybe had and didn’t care, was that no rules also translates into, and past, no safety, to the chilly land where no one’s in charge and that most specifically means you. Or in this case, me. Maybe she’d thought about that, too, and just didn’t give a queenly shit. I did; not enough to stop, obviously, but enough to wonder, what would it be like to pass at once and finally into that daunting atmosphere, that place where the rug stays permanently pulled out from under you, where the murderous tilt is the lay of the land? How would it feel?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“She kept talking, on and on about transcursion, giving me first the dictionary definition—a passage beyond limits; extraordinary deviation—and then her own, infinitely more twisted interpretation: a change effected so deep, so fundamental, that when you emerged on the other end (if there was an other end, she wasn’t sure and seemed content not to know; for now it was the trip that mattered) you would be yourself a process, an agent of the change, a branch office, say, of the Church of the Transcursion.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“A clocked minute of static—a long time to sit and watch nothing, I was all for fast-forwarding but Nakota glared me down—then a sip of absolute blackness, recorded blackness, rich and menacing as an X ray of a cancer. Nakota, lips parting to say something but the thought drowned in the flash of an image: something like bloody stalks, caressing the screen like hands behind the glass, so greedily intimate even Nakota gave a tiny backstepping whoop. Then as if a barrier shattered, ferocious fun, whatever provided the images warming to this game: a vast black grin like the Funhole itself become its namesake, black asshole-mouth studded with teeth or bones like broken glass and in that Pandora opening Nakota breathless and me with my mouth hanging wide open, village idiot at freak show, a vertiginous glide forward as upon the screen came things I didn’t want to know about, oh yes I’m quite sophisticated, quite the bent voyeur, I can laugh at stuff that would make you vomit but how would you like to see the ecstatic prance of self-evisceration, a figure carving itself, re-created in a harsh new form from what seemed to be its own hot guts, becoming no figure at all but the absence of one, a cookie-cutter shape and in but not contained by its outline a blackness, a vortex of nothing so final that beside it the Funhole was harmless, do you see what I’m saying, the Funhole was a goddamned carnival ride next to this nonfigure and all at once what I wanted least, least, far less than to be struck blind or any kind of petty death was to see the figure turn (as it did now) in slick almost pornographic slowness and show me, show me what there was to see”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher