Gemma Files Quotes

#1. Being a ghost is like being invisible, so being invisible must be like being a ghost. Like being inside the shadow, always blundering towards people with your hands out, angry that can't see to comfort you.

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#2. Yeah, well, maybe magic's like that. Metaphor made real.

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#3. The day Chess Pargeter looks t' engage himself with any woman's situation'll be a cold one in the Hot Place for sure

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#4. I could see where the faded ink intersected with its surface, half-absorbed but half not, rendering part of every word a mere whisper, the shadow left behind when all its thicker parts had rotted away.

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#5. When the witness is ready, the ghost will appear. When things wear thin.

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#6. But you're a man, Chess. You're tough."
Chess snorted. "Ever seen the inside of a birthin' room? Stick a pin in the map almost anywhere, you'll find ten women tougher'n me - and you, for that matter.

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#7. She is the only true thing.

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#8. I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it.

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#9. no matter it's actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story. A film's production forms a time capsule, becoming a static window into a particular moment of a particular era. Even period pieces tell you more about the times they were made in than the times they depict

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#10. The central question of any execution: do you want the hood on or off? Would you rather see it coming? Or would you rather simply drift away, cocooned in warm darkness, stinking of nothing but yourself? A kind, familiar place to hide in, just before the snap, the crackle? Or the pop?

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#11. stories lie hidden inside other stories, and we always know more about any given thing than we think we do, even if the only thing we know is nothing.

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#12. I live for books that produce a mood of gathering creepy fascination, a true descent in the Weird.

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#13. The primal sin of those like myself, mes amis, is that because we were once people who acted like beasts, we are forever cursed to be beasts who know they were once men. ("In The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise")

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#14. Free will, that bitch of a thing. Given the freedom to choose, we human beings will always make the wrong choice, every damn time.

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#15. it's the things you don't see, in this world or any other--the hidden things, unseen, lost between frames--that will always make all the difference.

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#16. For a thought cannot be un-thought, anymore than the world can be un-made, & thus we can never escape the consequences of our mistake, not without great price, & cost, & pain. Or perhaps not even then.

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#17. These narrative structures have to be thought out beforehand, you see--strategized, methodically according to content. Because a story, in the main, dictates its own telling.

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#18. I will always want to earn what I get, however much it hurts; that I want it because it hurts, because pain gives life a pain, and without it life isn't even death, just . . . nothingness.

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#19. Yeah, that's right, Doc: I'm Chess Pargeter, he's Ed Morrow-this is a gun, so's this. Now, I'm just gonna go outside and kill that big bastard, and if I come back in here and find Ed ain't been fixed in the interim, you best believe I will end you. Got that?

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#20. I tend to go back and forth between old favourites and "new" stuff, some of which could easily be by authors I've hitherto heard about but haven't had the chance to catch up with.

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#21. In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person's dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

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#22. Miracles, black, white, and grey all over. Like light on a wall, telling a story; like magic. Like cinema itself.

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#23. I've always wanted to write about a "haunted" film, something imbued with a malign, potentially fatal attraction, an image which poisons everyone who's unfortunate enough to view it.

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