Furnace Quotes

“In hindsight, we should have been more vigilant, more aware that these were the places of a town where spticemia and putrification creep in first, those lonely and familiar sections we slipped into and through every day without concern or care-not the seedy crumbling but flashy edges where decay was expected, and, from a certain element of our small society, even accepted and encouraged. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts, these were the places we never gave a single thought about, because we thought they would be here forever, unchanging in the antiseptic amber of our fixed memories. These quiet streets of lonely backwater districts were always the first to go.”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“In her tiny dorm room bathroom, under the bright buzz of fluorescent tubes, Knox and Severin silently draw. When they finish, they stare into the mirror, at themselves, at each other. Severin flicks off the light switch. The tiny room plunges into darkness, but their reflections remain bright in the silver glass, skin like pale moths, hair like flame, eyes like fireflies. Slender green threads of electricity travel up and down the spikes of their mohawked heads. Knox turns to her: their tongues touch tip to tip, briefly, and small sparks arc out from their blackened fingernails, leaving feathery singe marks on the yellowing countertop”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“Life: never extinguished, simply traveling, from one perfect creation to the next. Pale flakes drift up around the undead and the dying, all of them heedless to the rising drifts, the pressing cold. Stars wheel and gyre mindlessly in the heavens above us. Branches dislodge their heavy wintery burden, anointing the heads of wolves with silver crowns. And all the terrors of the night have vanished, valiant Mina, deep into the obsidian oblivion of a sudden sleep. Is this not the most beautiful of all countries? Is this not the most wondrous of all nights?”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“And so I scrabble greedily about in a cold barren room in a castle that has no name, for a few exquisite sparks of a long-lost summer. Endless winter in these mountains, endless desiccated life, two lovers, and no love at all.
Will this be your existence?Will this be you?
What is it that I say and do here in the cold,
on the snow of a country that it not my home?”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“Behind her, the merchant presses the eletric hammer against her lower spine, and pulls the trigger again. Wasp dreams of slamming through the ground, her bones melding with saurian predators trapped miles below the surface of dead dried seas”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“Behind and around him, behind and around me, the fully formed streets of my childhood soon will stand, birthed out of the ruins of the southernmost town like a still-born giantess, a puppet of calcified dreams and bone, pulled into unwanted existence by the strings of someone else’s desire. This, this is my mother’s endless suffocating desire, slowing time down around us, winding it back, back, until it becomes the amber-boned river in which I am always and only her little girl, eternal and alone.”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace

“Everyone has known that the town is dying, long before we could see it. But only I know the reason why. My mother is coming for her little girl, once again burning the world away until there is only us and the memories of us together, until there is only her memories of how it used to be, how it should have been. And there are no more towns left to hide in, no more versions or dreams of me left to fight.”
― Livia Llewellyn, Furnace