Top 55 Caitlin R. Kiernan Quotes
#1. He swallows a soothing mouthful of Jim Beam and rubs at his face, trying to rub away the familiar regret, that he can't take back words that are already history, that have found their mark and already done their damage.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#2. You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#3. Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#4. The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#5. Julia follows the beach, the sand that is so white it makes her doubt the beaches in Heaven could possibly be any whiter, the water like peacock feathers lapping at the shore, vivid green blue going hyacinth out where the sea starts getting deep.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#6. Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#8. All too infrequently do I encounter a new voice as delightful, compelling, and intelligent as that of Molly Tanzer.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#9. Stop it," Chance says out loud, angryraw, scornful voice that she hardly recognizes, "Jesus, just fucking stop it," but she's crying again, and her eyes burn, and she's so goddamn sick of the sound, the smell and saltbland flavor of her own useless tears.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#10. What makes us brave isn't lacking the good sence to be afraid; it's looking back at what we've lived through and seeing if we've faced it well.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#11. Maybe I just have everything backwards. Maybe it's a problem of perspective. In this Post-Modern Age perhaps it is the digital experiences we ought to cheer as "genuine " and not those troublesome and inconvenient analog ones.
Looking at it all fucking backwards.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#13. Dancy can hear rain beginning to fall on the tar-paper roof of the cabin. Fat summer raindrops, and it's the sweetest sound, almost, sweet as the end of a fever, as ripe as red apples.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#14. Dancy closes her eyes, remembering all the times that have been so much worse than this, all the horror and shame and sorrow to give her strength. The burning parts of her no one and nothing can ever touch, the fire where her soul used to be.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#15. I loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I'd take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#16. You think one's any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that's all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it's all the same to the worms.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#17. It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#19. A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#20. I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#21. No one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you. Not a pretty comparison but maybe it's the best we'll ever deserve, either of us.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#22. That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#23. Eva was only a slut. She never had the requisite motivation to be anything so useful or lucrative as a whore.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#24. The horse is dead," she says and squeezes Soldier's hand. "From here we walk."
"Anyone ever told you you're sort of a creepy kid?" Odd Willie asks.
"All the damn time," Emmie tells him. "I don't bother keeping count anymore.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#26. ... but that was a long time ago, a long story everyone's tired of repeating, or a short story simply not worth repeating again.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#27. I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#28. You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#29. You love someone. You don't leave her to drown. And you don't tell her she's crazier than she already knows that she is!
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#30. Some stories don't have endings," she says. "In some stories, there aren't even answers.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#31. No sound here but the river lapping hungry at the edge of the forest, the sigh of the wind in the leaves and the rasping drone of insects.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#32. Listen: Love your fiction, even if you hate the act of creating that fiction, love the stories to a fault. Cry at your tragedies, laugh at your jokes, rejoice at your character's victories - or give it all up and go knit a damned sweater, instead.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#34. I realize how arrogant it is to claim I can sort what is relevant from what is irrelevant.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#35. A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#36. Art should never be a slave to commerce, but for all working artists that's exactly what it must be.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#37. Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#38. I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That's the paradox of me.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#39. Her words, her jumbled, mad thoughts tamed or simply broken, made language, and she took another drag off the Lucky, exhaled, and read the last sentence aloud.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#40. I don't like remembering the way that hurt her. Hurts her. I'm sure it still does; I'm just not around to see, and I don't like dwelling on that, either. That's only normal. Missing people you still love, and not wanting to see them in pain and angry and humiliated.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#41. There are new smells on the wind, the healthy scent of green and growing things, the way a summer day can smell, or a greenhouse, sugarsmooth aroma of budding trees and water flowing free across coarse and sparkling sand.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#42. I shouldn't be this tired when I try to find my way back to the tree. I'll rest for a while, and I'll drift back down to the orchard, and the stone wall. I'll lie in my bed and wait. Someone has turned the ponies out again.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#43. After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#44. Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#46. Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#47. I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks no one is watching.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#48. Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#49. Chance takes a deep breath, fills her lungs with all the brightness getting in through the window, filling herself with that sane and ordinary air, with what she knows is real, reality to make her brave.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#50. No strings attached," Constance said again. "Oh, there are always strings," I replied. "Whether we put them there or not.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#51. Dead people, dead ideas and supposedly dead moments are never really dead and they shape every moment of our lives. We ignore them and this makes them powerful.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#52. Writing makes it even harder than concrete. Writing makes it hard as diamond.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#53. Time is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever passed away, not entirely.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#54. And all the shelves rising up around her like book-lined walls of a fortress, safe in here, always safe in here from the world, guarded by books and all the secrets inside them, all the things hardly anyone else will ever care to learn.
Caitlin R. Kiernan
#55. Too often, it occurs to him that he's lived just long enough to have completely outlived the world that made sense to him, the world where he fit. He
Caitlin R. Kiernan
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