The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Quotes

“Have I been clear enough? The world is dying, is in fact already well on its way to being dead. Were it not, you never would never have wandered in here. You would never have occasion to think, what is this? An unoccupied bunker in which to shelter myself? What luck! And then have fallen into my trap. You instead would have a job in a small town as an accountant, say, or a data specialist.”
― Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

“Yours is a holy calling,” he told her.
“Or a useless one.”
“Perhaps,” he said, ever the optimist. “Perhaps.” Then he embraced her again and departed. It was, the archivist suddenly realized, the last human contact she was likely to ever have.”
― Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

“Why is it, he wondered, that you only learn the specifics of the conflicts within your own family when you are grown and it is too late to avoid having been influenced by them unawares? Why only after you have metabolized them and made them part of your whole way of looking at the world?”
― Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

“Nameless Citizen!” The voice called. Surely you don’t want our species to die out?”
But I did. Why ever not? We had destroyed almost everything along with ourselves. It would be better for what little remained if we did die out.
Or they, I should say, since even though I was one of them, I could hardly be said to be so now. The disaster had changed me. I had become a different creature altogether.”

“I’m going to stop you right there,” I said “I might be nameless, but I am not a citizen. Not of your community.”
― Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

“And then he would tell me a story about a city that had come from another world, a city that was, in ways he either could not explain or which I could not understand, sentient. The beings in this city had once been like us.”
― Brian Evenson, The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell