The Fisherman Quotes

“Heaven doesn’t want me, and hell’s afraid I’ll take over.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“It would be a lie to say the time passes quickly. It never does, when you want it to.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“Have you ever been so scared of something you move toward it, try to touch it, that kind of thing?”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“You can make an oyster surrender its pearl,” Clara says. “All you need is persistence and a sharp enough knife.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“A bit of laughter can be the bridge that lets you cross out of a bad time, believe you me.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“The ocean is everywhere. Not only does it stretch to the horizon in all directions, it’s under everything as well. I don’t mean underground, I mean — it’s fundamental, you might say. If what’s around us is a picture, then this is what it’s drawn on. Reverend Mapple had a word for it, the subjectile. Lottie said it was like, if you could cut a hole in the air, black water would come pouring out of it.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“All loss is not created equal, you see. Loss is—it’s like a ladder you don’t know you’re standing at the top of and that reaches down, way down past the loss of your job, your possessions, your home; past the loss of your parents, your spouse, your children; down to the loss of your very life”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“people’s memories are short for any sorrow that isn’t theirs,”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“She lost him to light the color of the full moon, of the froth on top of a wave, of a burial shroud.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“But there are times you pull something out of the water for which there's no accounting, the only remnant of a story whose contours are a mystery.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think, 'Here, there are secret places.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“I know it’s not the darkest month, and I know it’s not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can’t explain.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“I don’t know if, deep down, all stories of falling in love are the same. Some days, it seems to me that, once you duck your head beneath the surface details, you find yourself in pretty much the same sequence of events. Other days, I think, No, it’s those details that are the point.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“Remember the fairy tales, all the witches and wizards with their houses in the woods. Maybe they want privacy for their work. Maybe there is something about the places they choose to live. Maybe the world is thinner there. Maybe they can hear the sounds they are listening for more clearly.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“I don’t know if you’ve spent time in the Catskills. From a distance, say, the parking lot of the old Caldor’s (which became an Ames that became a Stop ‘N’ Shop) in Huguenot, they’ve always made me think of a herd of giant animals, all standing grazing on the horizon. Up close, when you’re driving among them with the early morning light breaking over their round peaks, they seem incredibly present, more real than real, these huge solid heaps of rock that wear their trees like mile-long scarves. You glance at them, trying to keep your eyes on the road, which is already pretty busy with people driving up for a weekend getaway, and somehow you wouldn’t be surprised if the mountain closest to you were to cast off its trees in one titanic shrug and start to lumber away, a vast, unimaginable beast. When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think, Here, there are secret places. Well,”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“When you turn off onto whatever secondary road you need to take, and you’re following its twists and turns back into the mountains, and the ground is steep to either side of you, opening every now and then on a meadow, or an old house, you think, Here, there are secret places.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“The notion of a corporate family that took care of its own and in so doing earned their loyalty was on the way out, evicted by simple greed.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“His wounds cut down to the bone—through the bone, to the marrow—and any relief you can find from that kind of pain, however temporary, you take. The trick is, enduring the guilt that grabs you in its broken teeth the minute that comfort ebbs.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“With each year that passed, I came to ask myself if Marie might not have gone out of this world so much as gone more deeply into it. From being wrapped up in earth, maybe she’d made her way out into it, into the soil, the water, until she was part of things. Maybe she’d found a way to lead me back to her.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“His wounds cut down to the bone—through the bone, to the marrow—and any relief you can find from that kind of pain, however temporary, you take.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“He must have known that he was buying into a scenario that was, on some level, a lie, and he had been willing to sacrifice the reality of friendship, however mundane, in favor of that lie.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“A bit of laughter can be the bridge that lets you cross out of a bad time,”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“A few folks say the man mumbles to himself all the while he’s doing whatever it is he’s doing. Keeping time, could be. If he notices anyone watching him, he tips his hat to them, then returns to his work. That gesture, that tip of the hat, bothers whoever’s on the receiving end of it. There’s mockery in the touch of hand to hat, not enough to be insulting, but more than enough to make a person self-conscious. There’s a kind of warning to it, too, as if the man is saying, “Okay, you’ve seen me: now run along.” There are few who see it who don’t leave off their viewing and go straight home.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“My curiosity’s been pricked.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“What is truly bad, in a way that pumps fresh meaning into that deflated word, returning to it all the force it possessed when her parents used it on her when she was a child—what is bad is that each vile chapter in the other-Lottie’s fantasy of degradation evokes a response in her beyond simple revulsion. Every ugly assertion makes a part of Lottie jump with recognition. She’s no liar, this blank face. She’s telling the truth, giving voice to impulses Lottie hasn’t wanted to be aware she has. She’s tried to make of her soul a garden, so to speak, but the other-her’s words dig into the soil and overturn it, exposing what is wet and wriggling there to the light of day.”
― John Langan, The Fisherman