Steve Rasnic Tem Quotes

#1. The strongest presence is so often an absence.

Steve Rasnic Tem

#2. The world is full of horror. Our imaginations struggle to keep up. It would be a poor life without imagining. I'm not sure we can have any salvation, in fact, without imagining.

Steve Rasnic Tem

#3. We carry our fears with us wherever we go. We pack them neatly, holding them close because if we lost them, where would we be?

Steve Rasnic Tem

#4. A life was a secret thing, even between a husband and wife. Your secret life was completely your own, and because it was unknown, would never be mourned. The secret life of each individual went unhonored through eternity.

Steve Rasnic Tem

#5. If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving.

Steve Rasnic Tem

#6. For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me.

Steve Rasnic Tem

#7. Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming. But most, I think, are punished.

Steve Rasnic Tem

#8. For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky.

Steve Rasnic Tem

#9. Everything is dangerous. Even in your dreams. Even if you sleep without dreams. From the moment you jump out of bed and take that first breath. Something terrible might happen. Someone's bound to die before the story is over. You might even fall in love.
-The Man On The Ceiling

Steve Rasnic Tem

#10. Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable. Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come.

Steve Rasnic Tem