Bad Man Quotes

“He didn't mind, though. He hardly noticed at all. Because that's the thing about hope--when it seems that there's no point in moving, it pushes us so forcefully that we come to feel like we /need/ it to keep going...

And that's what hope really is, after all. An anesthetic. Something that takes the sharp edges of reality out of focus just enough that we can keep looking at it, keep moving forward with steps that are guided by the assurance that every inch of ground can't possibly be covered in broken glass. And then when it /is/--- when your feet are left as coiled ribbons of wet skin-- you forget what guided you there in the first place.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Bad Man

“...as hope comforts us, it becomes easier and easier to forget that it too was in the jar that Pandora carried. It's the one horror of the world that wasn't loosed when she opened the lid.

It's the one horror that lives in us.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Bad Man

“Where did you come from?” Ben muttered to the toy, like it might answer. Stampie just smiled. And just like Ben’s first night, it felt almost as if the store were smiling back.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Bad Man

“Come the middle of October, the air was beginning to cool, but like every year, it was happening slowly. It was hard to even feel yet. But the woods could tell. The orange-and-red requiem for the hotter months played vibrantly on the leaves of the oak trees that peppered the side of the road, a beautiful and warm foreground for the choir of deep green pines beyond.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Bad Man

“Man’s life is a line that Nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent… —Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature (1770)”
― Dathan Auerbach, Bad Man

“He couldn’t know how scary having a child could be, knowing there’s a piece of yourself out in the world that you can protect only with warnings and rules that could be ignored and broken;”
― Dathan Auerbach, Bad Man

“Sitting on his floor with his back against the mattress, he cried for the first time in years. Not so much for the deaths of his grandparents, but at the thought of a man who knew he wouldn’t need a suitcase anymore.”
― Dathan Auerbach, Bad Man