Intercepts Quotes

“Daddy… please eject.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“Deliver me a pain that I can feel. Let me know that I am alive.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“But even blackness, when there’s nothing to contrast it against, is it truly black? Or is it just… nothing?”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“Children or not, people were going to be people. They’d be lazy if you let them. They’d be catty if you allowed it. And they’d blame you if they could.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“He loves you, Kate… You are his weakness…”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“He would find his daughter always. He would watch over her”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“Why doesn’t this country build big, ambitious shit like that anymore? she wondered.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“mind”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“And down she dug. Through skin. Through muscle. Through tendon. Through bone. She dug and clawed until she had reached the padded floor beneath Carson’s shredded body. And still she didn’t stop.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“At last she reached the flesh of his back. Her hands, never slowing, clawed at the flesh, tearing out large chunks of skin as she went. She ripped out bone and organ.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“They open my eyes to burn them with light. They open my ears to stab them with sound. They open my nerves to set them on fire.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“I tell my hand to stretch out its fingers and dig its nails into my cheek. To scratch. To claw. To rip away the flesh. To find the nerve-ends and pluck at them.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“fuck,” Hannah said, patting Riley’s hand. “Sometimes our minds are like reservoirs. More and more gets poured into it, and they fill and fill. And our little emotional reservoirs have always held, no matter what shit we’ve dealt with. We think we can deal. But grief is this fucking monsoon. And it just doesn’t stop. And it fills our reservoir. And fills it. And fills it. Then all those dams and dykes and levees and locks or whatever, all those things we’ve built to keep our reservoirs from overflowing… they burst. And when one of them bursts, they all burst. Like dominoes. And it can be debilitating. But it’s okay. It’s normal.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“Joe performing unauthorized shutdowns… Joe “suggesting” that Tyler station all his security forces in the lobby instead of down below because of the “optics”… Fuck.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“See, back in the 70s, the CIA experimented with all sorts of torture. Forced interrogation methods and stuff. Anything to get prisoners talking, spilling the goods. We’re talking water-boarding, tight confinement, sleep deprivation, pumping them full of LSD. Anything that anyone could dream up. One thing they tried was extreme sensory deprivation. They’d lock people in pitch-black, silent rooms. Days, weeks, or even months on end. Psychologically, it’s devastating. Without sensory stimulation, the brain just goes haywire.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“It was the same strategy as being a good parent. Be warm, but firm. Set sensible rules then communicate and enforce them clearly.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“gripped the knife in her sweatshirt pocket, fully ready to pull it out and slash at any demon bitches that jumped out.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“After he found himself reading the same paragraph three times, and the words still didn’t enter his brain on any cognitive level, he finally gave up and resigned himself to a bad night.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“The more I try, the more the stabs of pain ripple through my eyelids. I then realize that there are hooks prying my eyelids open. They must have placed the hooks there. They are making me watch.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“Sometimes our minds are like reservoirs. More and more gets poured into it, and they fill and fill. And our little emotional reservoirs have always held, no matter what shit we’ve dealt with. We think we can deal. But grief is this fucking monsoon. And it just doesn’t stop. And it fills our reservoir. And fills it. And fills it. Then all those dams and dykes and levees and locks or whatever, all those things we’ve built to keep our reservoirs from overflowing… they burst. And when one of them bursts, they all burst. Like dominoes. And it can be debilitating. But it’s okay. It’s normal.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“I do not know. I may never know. I scream. Not from pain, but because my ears can’t hear what I say. And so, I scream louder. I’m shouting. I’m telling myself to shriek. Any pitch, any frequency that might penetrate my dead ears. But I hear nothing. Maybe I never screamed at all. Maybe I never stopped screaming.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“Her mouth stretched into a wide, gaping oval. She screamed. “Totally agree,” Carson said in response. “Cool, no restraints then.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“They didn’t just kill him. They wanted to hurt him. It was a fury and viciousness that didn’t exist in nature. That is what we have created, Hannah thought. Something outside the bounds of nature.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“If someone had asked him a week ago if it was worth it, he’d spin the question around: It wasn’t that he worked hard instead of being a good father; he was a good father because he worked so hard.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“You think too small, kid. Everything is part of a larger plan.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“But numbness overshadowed her emotions.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“That was the power of parenthood; the protective instincts overrode everything else.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“I feel nothing… They did this to me… He did this to me…”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“My mind retains the faintest fragments of the concept of Hell, and sometimes that’s where I think I am.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts

“But once he actually started working, he realized that everything was held together by duct tape and twine, not for lack of technological know-how, but because duct tape and twine were cheaper and easier than dealing with the crippling bureaucracy.”
― T.J. Payne, Intercepts