The Deep Quotes

“Paranoia is itself a kind of contagion. Humans are predisposed to it. I have long held that it is a learned behavior from our primitive ancestors, a defense mechanism. Cautious humans stay alive longer than incautious ones.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Fear was a chained dog, startling and rough and always dangerously close, stretching its leash, baring fangs.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Someone once told her that the stars were merely sewing pins, holding the black sky up so that it did not come down on the world and suffocate it.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“So many times, Dai told himself he was a fool. And yet he stayed. There was no release from love, anyhow. There was only learning how to live with the hurt.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“The living are often anchors for the dead. The old newspaperman Stead’s words come back to him, how the dead want to lay down their troubles and escape to the next world, but it’s the living, unable to let go, who keep them here. Love and desperation like heavy chains lash them to the earth.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“We are all, men and women, creatures of desires both good and bad. But everything has a price, and the price of indulging in that which is bad for us is often guilt; and too much guilt results in a sickness of the mind. We have poisoned our conscience, and something poisoned will need treatment one day—or it will rot.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“To be honest, I’m not sure listening to one’s heart has ever gotten anyone anywhere good.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“A ship so massive, and here we are, trapped on it, nowhere to run.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“She, like her friends, had been groomed and bred to wed princelings. Being a debutante was a blood sport. And she had succeeded, gotten the richest man in the world to propose to her. It made her the envy of all her friends. One even had a nervous breakdown over it.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“But there’s something about his generosity, his kindness, that makes her feel weighted down and sad. He is buoyant—of another dimension, one that does not experience the friction of the world in the same way she does. His fingers dart around the edges of a cigarette he twirls in his hand, and all she can think is ease. She has never felt that. She is more like the cigarette itself, passed from hand to mouth to earth, sucked dry and then forgotten.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Ever since having his own child, he’d noticed he’d gotten more sensitive to mortality—he used to be aware of it but brazenly so. Now it whispered to him, tapped his shoulder, and distracted him when things were quiet.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“The air out here was ghostly, craving something of her. Something she would never let herself give.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“There was no release from love anyhow; there was only learning how to live with the hurt.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“It’s disrespectful. A sick indulgence. I beg you, Caroline: let the dead rest in peace.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep

“Without Caroline, he had nothing. Without Caroline, he was nothing. Maybe this was the truest definition of love he’d ever experienced. Not the kind he’d experienced with Lillian, the kind that unhinged him, made him wild. But the kind that had the power to anchor and secure him, to make him become the man he ought to have been all along.”
― Alma Katsu, The Deep