Hasty for the Dark Quotes

“As she draws level the flickering light strikes her. But under closer scrutiny she is not the young firefox that I presumed she was. With that posture, that chin held so high, those cold beautiful eyes, that tight tapering skirt and those feet mounted on pedestals with heels like blades, how could I have been so wrong? Her hair is not blonde, but white. The dead white of the pantomime wig. That haughty catwalk face is actually more like a skull too, with aged parchment stretched across it; a dry surface freshly painted with a palette more suited to the circus clown than the city girl.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“What can I say? London has great PR. But if you’re neither rich nor young, it’ll take you out, drive you out or drive you mad. London has its own rules. Anything can happen there.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“Frustration was incendiary. It had the potential to ignite the black lump of my despair, a slow-burning and inexhaustible fuel. Boredom fanned the embers red. Futility was the by-product of my smouldering; the cinders and ash that my hopes and purpose had been reduced to. My efforts and thoughts were the smokeless exhaust from a life wasted and rendered meaningless.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“Even on the unlit walls of the stairwell a long and spiky shadow was cast by her antics above. Though I could not see Lois, the air was moving violently, as were parts of her shadow, and I knew she was already batting the side of her face with her hands and then throwing her arms into the air above her scruffy grey head.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“this one. These places often reminded him of old films. And for good or ill, he knew that houses were also similar to people. Just as you never really knew what was going on behind a face, you also had no idea what a home really looked like behind the façade.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“He’d also arrived at the conclusion that if we vividly remembered the misery of every cold, cut and bruise, in anticipation of the next illness or misfortune, we would all go mad. The ability to forget was a kind of advance braking system of the mind. The effectiveness of his own mental ABS surprised him. So, did the insane have perfect recall? Did they possess the ability to imagine the consequences of existence, and the full horror of those consequences?”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“We drive because we forget, he decided. We forget pain, we forget fear, we forget the hot-cold paralysis of near misses, we forget consequences. We forget our vulnerability: the very fragility of our bodies. We forget about our wobbling heads packed with brain matter, mounted on a thin spinal column – the weakest link in the entire animal kingdom. And we forget how we are dependent upon those minuscule threads of nerve tissue that, once severed, remove all sensation from the legs, and introduce the wheezing apparatus that will stand sentinel at our white-sheeted beds.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“Sorry,’ I say again. But I quickly pull back my hand when my fingers encircle something hard, but no thicker than a flute, inside the thin sleeve of a blouse. And even though the tunnel is only illumined by the ambient light spilling from the Bakerloo Line platform, I am sure the figure I have touched has just bent forward at the waist and tried to bite my retreating hand. I hear the sound of something clacking, like two domino pieces in a wooden box. I step away.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“Does the head wrapped so tightly in the dirty scarf look up at me, or is it not bothered? In the thin light I’m reminded of a balloon I once covered in wallpaper paste and strips of newspaper at school, before painting it. Within days the balloon was punctured and removed, leaving a dry, hollow head behind that I didn’t want to take home with me, and was glad to see crushed into a bin that smelled of orange peel and pencil shavings.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark: Selected Horrors

“There was no empathy left here. There was only a fear of one’s own demise and the struggle to keep on existing, while dead on one’s feet and demoralised.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark

“Just as every God has slept through our Godless endeavours, any God can yet awaken.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark

“Only the monstrous could ever be ascendant. Sadists and sociopaths had completely enslaved us and removed any chance of inner or spiritual life. The inmost light had been doused within a whole species.”
― Adam Nevill, Hasty for the Dark