The Pallbearers Club Quotes

“A book is a coffin because it holds a body, sometimes more than one, and we readers are there to witness, mourn, and celebrate. I like the idea of people (Yes, you. Hi, there!), no matter how small the number, lifting and carrying this casket for a time, honoring it with their attention, experience, memory, and melancholic wonder at what was, at what might be. When you put it down, when you stop carrying it, you'll move on, like you must. And who knows, perhaps years later a snippet of the book's memory will unexpectedly alight and linger; a memory of a time and place and of the person you once were, if you allow it.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“I haven't asked for help because I'm afraid to learn I could've ben helping myself all along and I've wasted so much time, a lifetime, and I haven't asked for help because I'm trying my best and I don't want to know my best isn't good enough, will never be good enough, and I don't ask for help because help means coping with the terrible thing and I don't want to cope, to simply go on, and I childishly think coping hides the fact that there is no purpose and no reason for anything.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“The blanket was the flimsiest form of sleep protection. I've always dreaded the act of going to sleep, not for fear I wouldn't wake but instead that I would wake and be woefully, perilously, self-loathingly, odiously, heuristically, irrevocably unprepared for the new and banal terrors that awaited.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“A book is a coffin because it holds a body, sometimes more than one, and we readers are there to witness, mourn, and celebrate. I like the idea of people (Yes, you. Hi, there!), no matter how small the number, lifting and carrying this casket for a time, honoring it with their attention, experience, memory, and melancholic wonder at what was, at what might be. When you put it down, when you stop carrying it, you'll move on, like you must. And who knows, perhaps years later a snippet of the book's memory will unexpctedly alight and linger; a memory of a time and place and of the person you once were, if you allow it.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“I saw it happening, and they revealed two empty sockets, or maybe her eyes had gone white, a terrible white like the rolled eyes of an attacking shark or swollen spider eggs ready to hatch, and the worst part was I’d feel them seeing me. They’d always see me.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“Yeah, we Gen-Xers hated ourselves almost as much as we loved ourselves.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“Hope is believing there’ll be another moment of joy, and despair is knowing there won’t be one more.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“Sorry, Mom and Dad, the name you assigned was a valiant effort, but it does not sum up who I was, who I am, or who I will become.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“horror is a full-color thing.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“(There’s a difference between a bully’s laugh and one that offers commiseration, one that recognizes if not shared experience, then a common frailty. Detecting that difference is instinctual for some, while others learn it only after repeated hard lessons.)”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“My nope to that would be resolute. I was resolved. I wasn’t going to budge. I was a barnacle. I was a rock. I was an island. I was a goddamned Simon & Garfunkel song or whatever moveless thing I needed to be because I was not going into the cemetery.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“I’ve always dreaded the act of going to sleep, not for fear I wouldn’t wake but instead that I would wake and be woefully, perilously, self-loathingly, odiously, heuristically, irrevocably unprepared for the new and banal terrors that awaited.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club

“She snatched the photo away and sighed. Could one’s life be measured in the collective spent oxygen of sighs one received? Christ, I hoped not.”
― Paul Tremblay, The Pallbearers Club