Tours of the Black Clock Quotes

“1939. Love rages. It cries out from you, seething and red; I come back for more and more.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“This was the day his life split in two. Her name was Kara.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“I looked out my window onto the street, the same street, the same buildings I always see, the windows that stare back at my own; and it was different. The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other branch of a river that's been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike: the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“I struck down his evil no matter what name it took for itself, no matter that it called itself history or revolution, America or the son of God, no matter that it called itself righteous, a righteousness that presumed the license to bind the free word and thought, that presumed the wisdom to timetable the birth of a soul, that presumed the morality that offers its children up to the plague rather than teach them the language of love. A thousand righteous champions calcified into something venal and mean by their presumptions of something sacred and pure and undirtied by the blood and spit and semen of being human: I recognized all of them by the bit of him they carried, sometimes in one eye, sometimes under their nails.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“In the dark, in no starlight at all, the blocks hurtled invisibly by, ejected into the night air; he heard them break but he believed it was only the echoes of broken windows, not even his broken windows but someone else’s in some other city, people all over the night searching madly for those who transmitted the vague and unpersuasive frequency of destiny, not even this night but some other night that came before, from which the sound of breaking windows reached him only now like the light of novae. Ice busting in the dirt. The storm turned north.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“You keep looking around for who’s in fucking charge, and there’s just nobody like that at all. The cops just ride their horses back and forth through the park, up and down Fifth Avenue. Who the hell’s angry on Fifth Avenue, that’s what I want to know.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock

“I get to the back of the house, I damn near tear the door off the hinges. It isn’t an act of fury, fury isn’t part of it anymore. It’s more deliberate than fury yet more instinctive than deliberation.”
― Steve Erickson, Tours of the Black Clock