Carrion Comfort Quotes

“Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally it sold about three million copies. We”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Black man invented plasma. Fellow named Charles Drew. I read somewhere that he bled to death after a car accident in the nineteen fifties because some cracker North Carolina hospital didn’t have any ‘Negro blood’ in the fridge and refused to give him ‘white blood.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Even if it all fails, it was worth the time,” Saul Laski said softly. “The powerful have received their share of the world’s attention even when their power has been shown as sheer evil. The victims remain the faceless masses. Numbers. Mass graves. These monsters have fertilized our century with the mass graves of their victims and it is time that the powerless had names and faces—and voices.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Here’s the deal. Willi’s bought the rights to a paperback best-seller called The White Slaver. It’s a piece of formulized shit written for illiterate fourteen-year-olds and the kind of lobotomized housewife that lines up to buy the new Harlequin romances each month. Jack-off material for intellectual quadriplegics. Naturally”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“He wished he were home in Charleston, listening to the Dave Brubeck Quartet on the stereo and reading Bruce Catton.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“a degree in psychiatry merely qualifies one to begin learning about the intricacies and foibles of the human personality.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Don’t you see, Anthony? For all the evangelicals’ talk about this nation being founded on religious principles…this being a Christian nation and all…most of the Founding Fathers were like Jefferson…atheists, pointy-headed intellectuals, Unitarians…”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Strange,” said Natalie. “What?” “Two gunshot wounds, pneumonia, a concussion, three broken ribs, and enough cuts and bruises to keep a football team happy for a full season.” “Jews are hard to kill.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“The Oberst chuckled. “The Führer was a cheap poseur,” he said. “On April twenty-second…I remember it was two days after his birthday…the Führer decided to leave for the south to take command of Schoerner and Kesselring’s army groups before Berlin fell. I persuaded him to stay. The next day I flew out of the city in a light plane, using as a runway an avenue that ran through the shattered Tiergarten. Move, Herr Barent.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Great,” said Natalie, “in evolutionary terms they’re supermen. In psychological development, they’re retarded. In moral terms, they’re subhuman.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Saul had seen the rash of demonic-children entertainments as a symptom of deeper underlying fears and hatreds; the “me-generation’s” inability to shift into the role of responsible parenthood at the cost of losing their own interminable childhood, the transference of guilt from divorce—the child is not really a child, but an older, evil thing, capable of deserving any abuse resulting from the adult’s selfish actions—and the anger of an entire society revolting after two decades of a culture dominated by and devoted to youthful looks, youth-oriented music, juvenile movies, and the television and movie myth of the adult-child inevitably wiser, calmer, and more “with-it” than the childish adults in the house hold. So Saul had lectured that the child-fear and child-hatred becoming visible in popular shows and books had its irrational roots in common guilts, shared anxieties, and the universal angst of the age. He had warned that the national wave of abuse, neglect, and callousness toward children had its historical antecedents and that it would run its course, but that everything possible must be done to avoid and eliminate that brand of violence before it poisoned America.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“I speculated, not for the first time, that the sanity of the nation would be much improved if children and adults were required by law to eat in separate public establishments.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“I had forgotten that monsters do not die. They must be killed.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“It just makes me so goddamn mad,” she said, still looking away from Saul. “Yes.” “I mean, it’s like he didn’t even count. He wasn’t important. Do you know what I mean?” “Yes.” “When I was little I used to watch cowboy shows on television,” she said. “And somebody would be killed—not the hero or villain, just some guy—and it’d be like he had never existed, you know? And it bothered me. I was only six or seven, but it bothered me. I always used to think about the person and how he must’ve had parents and all the years he’d taken to grow up and how he had to have got dressed that morning and then, bang, he doesn’t exist anymore because the writer wanted to show how fast the good guy was with a gun or something.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“It just makes me so goddamn mad,” she said, still looking away from Saul. “Yes.” “I mean, it’s like he didn’t even count. He wasn’t important. Do you know what I mean?”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“I had long since learned that to read about the follies and scandals of the world was to desecrate the morning.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“This is why we Hunt, woman. Look at yourself in the mirror! Do you want to die an old woman just because you’re tired of using them? Acch!” Willi stood and turned his back on us.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“All humans feed on violence, on the small exercises of power over another, but few have tasted—as we have—the ultimate power.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“I despair at the rise of modern violence. I truly give in to despair at times, that deep, futureless pit of despair which Hopkins called carrion comfort.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“had a television set until I sold it at the height of the Vietnam War. Those sanitized snippets of death—made distant by the camera’s lens—meant nothing to me. But I believe it meant something to these cattle which surround me. When the war and the nightly televised body counts ended, they demanded more, more, and the movie screens and streets of this sweet and dying nation have provided it in mediocre, mob abundance. It is an addiction I know well.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“The advanced neocortex in the mind vampires we encounter is merely along for the ride. Mind vampires can speak words fluidly and feign altruism and social niceties, but all a mind vampire (as is true with any sociopath) really knows is fight or flight, ascendancy or submission, and hierarchy and control. And violence. Always violence. The violence of their will over yours. And they live to control you.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“As G. K. Chesteron once wrote: “You can free things from alien or accidental laws of their own nature…. Do not go about…encouraging triangles to break out of the prison of their three sides. If a triangle breaks out of its three sides, its life comes to a lamentable end.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“As was the case with so many young people I encountered these days, I could not tell if the boy was truly retarded or just pitifully ill educated. Most of the population under thirty appears to fall into one or the other category.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Natalie, this entire century has been a miserable melodrama written by third-rate minds at the expense of other people’s souls and lives. We can’t stop it. Even if we put an end to these…these aberrations, it will only shift the spotlight to some other carrion-eating actor in this violent farce. These things are done every day by people with no shred of this absurd psychic ability…people exercising power in the form of violence by right of their place, position, by bullet or ballot or the point of their knife blade…but by God these sons of bitches hurt our family, our friends, and we’re going to stop them.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Even as the handsome man answered, Aaron felt his mind skid like an automobile on black ice, felt his point of view shift so that he was looking down at all this, not accepting what would happen next but knowing what would happen, feeling—in his total inability to change one second of the past or future—the incredible, total unrelenting wave of helplessness that a hundred generations of Jews had felt before him, felt at the lip of the oven, felt at the door to the showers, felt while watching the flames rise from the old cities and while listening to the shouts of the goyim rise in ferocity and nearness.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Weltschmerz”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“All of our lives are governed by a certain degree of faith in bullshit.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“will. I swear I will.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort

“Natalie’s father had a saying for that behavior—Stupidity has a price and it always gets paid.”
― Dan Simmons, Carrion Comfort