The Hollow Places Quotes

“Come on, let's go back to the coffee shop and I'll make us Irish coffees and we'll discuss this like people who don't die in the first five minutes of a horror movie.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“If there's a way into hell, someone will always find it.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Heads for aliens, tails for black magic."
"Why does it have to be black magic? Can't it be neutral magic? Magic with no significant moral imperative?"
Simon rolled his eyes, caught the coin in midair, and slapped it on his wrist. "Good news, it's aliens.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“I did not look at the words on the wall. If I didn't look at them, they didn't matter. Words are meaningless until you read them.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Uncle Earl believes strongly in Jesus, Moses, the healing power of crystals, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, that aliens landed at Roswell but the government is suppressing it, secret histories, faith-healing, snake-handling, that there is an invention that will replace gasoline but the oil companies are suppressing it, chemtrails, demon-possession, the astonishing powers of Vicks VapoRub, and that there’s proof that aliens contacted the Mayans and the Aztecs and probably the Egyptians, but the scientists are suppressing it. He believes in Skunk Ape, Chupacabras, and he positively adores Mothman. He is not Catholic, but he believes in the miracle of Fatima, visions of Mary appearing on toast, and he is nearly positive that the end times are upon us, but seems to be okay with this, provided it does not interfere with museum hours.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Other people's horrible relatives are remarkably soothing. You can be comfortably appalled without having to deal with them yourself.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“The first person we’d met and I wanted to get the hell away as quickly as I could. Typical.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“I was starting to think that half of the angst of a divorce wasn’t the loss of stability, it was coming to terms with just how lousy your judgment had been.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“But I understood wanting to go home. I had been trapped on the other side of the hole, in an alien world, and I would have sold my hope of heaven to go home again.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“I had always had mixed feelings about Narnia, mostly because of the heavy-handed lion-Jesus allegory. I suddenly had very strong feelings that C. S. Lewis had not spent nearly enough time on te sudden realization, when moving between worlds, that nothing could be taken for granted. Maybe fog hung around all day here, even when the sky was bright. Maybe there was no night, or maybe this was what night looked like. Maybe gravity stopped working here on Tusdays.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Turns out my left eye’s got some rare form of color blindness that only women get. So they think I’m probably a chimera and ate my twin in the womb and it’s actually her left eye.” I sipped the coffee. It was extremely good coffee. “Huh.” “The optometrist got very excited.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Panic was definitely called for right now, but for some reason, if there’s two people, only one of you panics at a time.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“They looked like the dreams of trees cast in bronze.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“A bunch of links were to spiritual warfare, which Uncle Earl had told me about once, where people think they’re off fighting demons. I suppose that’s one way to make church more interesting, but it all sounded like Jesus LARP to me. (I told Uncle Earl that, which forced me to explain LARPing. If you’ve never tried to describe hitting other people dressed as orcs with foam weapons, particularly to an elderly relative, you haven’t really lived.)”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Somewhere else. The next world over. Another plane of existence.
In another, much larger sense, my brain was screaming hysterically that there was a hole in the world.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“We had passed close in space, but separated by far too much time to make a difference.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Ladies, get you a man who can handle a portal to hell without freaking out.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“There’s a concept in graphic design called negative space. It’s all the spaces where you haven’t put something. If I draw a figure eight, for example, the negative space would be the two holes and the space around the outside of the lines. A good designer can use that to advantage. If you’ve ever looked at the FedEx logo, the negative space between the E and the x forms an arrow pointing forward. It isn’t always your friend. I once did a design where the negative space… well, let’s just say it had a certain male anatomical quality to it. Sometimes when you’ve stared at something for too long, you miss the really obvious.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“The humming noise chimed, coming closed again. Something moving behind the world, looking for us.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“This is normal, I told myself. This is totally normal. The world completely turned upside down and you were scared and you had to be competent and not freak out. Now you can freak out again and it’s just taking a while to all break loose. You’re fine. This is normal.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“I walked up the concrete steps. Sturdivant stood in the water just outside. I could see his organs spreading around him, like a drop of ink in water.
This is a dream.
"Did I get out?" I asked him.
He shook his head sadly and opened his mouth to say something, but only willow leaves came out.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Whatever was in the willows, it was made of the negative space between the branches. I don't know if I can explain it any better than that. As the branches moved and swayed and the leaves shifted, they made shapes in all the places that they weren't.
Those shapes were full of bodies. Not human bodies. Not even physical bodies as I understood it. But something there nonetheless. Silver light, though here and there I caught glimpses of bronze, patterns of light and shadow moving up through the willow branches. They rose up from the sand and slithered through the willows, huge and inhuman, shifting like smoke.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“I was angry at everything because this is the natural state of sixteen-year-olds.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Eighteen years to the day after Uncle Earl accepted Bigfoot into his life, my marriage ended.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“I looked at them for quite a long time, then I looked away and Simon didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything and we both did not say anything so loudly that the room rang with our silence.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“My internet armor had been built up in the fanfic battlegrounds and was thus impenetrable, but Uncle Earl was a gentle soul, and I was afraid that someone might hurt his feelings.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“God forgives a lot,” said Uncle Earl. “He has to. We all do a lot that needs forgiving.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Creation took seven days, but I don’t know how long a day is for God.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“This meeting of the Amphibious Skull Worshippers will come to order," I said out loud, and started giggling because the world was completely batshit and there were holes in the universe and people who went around stealing albino raccoons.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places

“Plus it was totally haunted by dead inmates.” “How do you know that?” “How could it not be?” “. . . You make a valid point.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Hollow Places