Top 93 Kelly Link Quotes
#1. Kelly Link's prose is conveyed in details so startling and fine that you work up a sweat just waiting for the next sentence to land. This is why we read, crave, need, can't live without short stories.
Tea Obreht
#2. Close your mouth and get out of the way, because here comes Kelly Link, than whom no one is better.
Peter Straub
#3. All best-of lists should close with the amazing Kelly Link.
Karen Joy Fowler
#4. Kelly Link is inimitable. Her stories are like nothing else, dark yet sparkling with her unique brand of fairy dust. This is the most marvelous kind of trouble to get in.
Erin Morgenstern
#5. The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
Jeff VanderMeer
#6. Everyone who is alive has a ghost inside them, don't they?
Kelly Link
#7. The Customer isn't always right. Sometimes the customer is an asshole. That's the first rule of retail.
Kelly Link
#8. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?
Here endeth the lesson.
Kelly Link
#9. The witch knew who had killed her and she snatched pieces of time, here and there, from the business of dying, to make her revenge.
Kelly Link
#10. What happens when you get to the end of the world? Sometimes you find a party. This party has been going on for a long time. There is music, lights, people drinking and dancing. Strange things happen at these parties. It is the end of the world, after all.
Kelly Link
#11. Sometimes it is safer to read maps with your feet.
Kelly Link
#12. Do you have a zombie contingency plan?
Kelly Link
#13. Charley looked like someone from a Greek play, Electra, or Cassandra. She looked like someone had just set her favorite city on fire.
Kelly Link
#14. Babies weren't babies - they were land mines; bear traps; wasp nests. They were a noise, which was sometimes even not a noise, but merely a listening for a noise; they were a damp, chalky smell; they were the heaving, jerky, sticky manifestation of not-sleep.
Kelly Link
#15. It's very unlikely that a writer is going to make a living by writing. So then the question is: how do you balance work, life, and writing? If you find out, please tell me.
Kelly Link
#16. Topiary has always seemed like a good occupation, comparable in some ways to writing short fiction.
Kelly Link
#17. Grace Kelly forged a link between Monaco and the movie world, and I would like to create a strong bond between Monaco and the fashion community.
Charlene, Princess Of Monaco
#18. In terms of style, too, I think I've been working with a somewhat limited
although intentionally limited
set of tools. So I'm attempting to be a bit looser as I start stories off. To digress. To make interesting mistakes.
Kelly Link
#19. I have things to not do, and not a lot of time to not do them in.
Kelly Link
#20. Look. All books are weird when you think about it ... It goes without saying that real life is also weird.
Kelly Link
#21. When one cannot afford a scandal, a blackmailer is an excellent bargain.
Kelly Link
#22. I don't abandon stories once I've started working on them. Once I sit down and start a story, I'll be damned if I'm going to give up on it. But I do reject most of the ideas for stories that I come up with.
Kelly Link
#23. The world is a dangerous place, full of people who don't trust each other. This is why I am staying up in this tree.
Kelly Link
#24. God has an inordinate fondness for stars and also for beetles. The small and the very far away.
Kelly Link
#25. Yes, well." The Devil says, "Things just get better and better nowadays.
Kelly Link
#26. She's wearing a T-shirt that says I'M SO GOTH I SHIT TINY VAMPIRES. "Hey,
Kelly Link
#27. who wanted to see a monster, even if it meant that you got to tell everyone about it?
Kelly Link
#28. Becka was almost good looking enough to be on a reality dating show, but not funny looking or sad enough to be on one of the makeover shows.
Kelly Link
#29. The initial spark usually has something to do with panic
I'm due to turn in a story to a workshop or an editor. It's a terrible working method.
Kelly Link
#30. We're reminders that people shouldn't feel too smug. That what you think you own, you don't. That life can change just like that." Fadwa snapped her fingers.
Kelly Link
#31. Everyone knows that wizards are pigheaded and come to bad ends.
Kelly Link
#32. How could I love you? How could I love a ghost? How could I love something that I have to keep hidden in my pocket?
Kelly Link
#33. Even when your eyes are closed, it feels black. As black as black ever gets, like if you touch it, your hand might get stuck in it, like tar or black quicksand or when you stretch out your hand at night, to turn on a light, but all you feel is darkness.
Kelly Link
#34. You get a lot of narrative energy from people who make really big mistakes, who act against their best interests, who do things that turn out to have serious consequences. It's very hard make a story out of people doing the right thing over and over again.
Kelly Link
#35. She put her feet down gently. The whole world was made of glass, and the glass was full of champagne, and Bunnatine was a bubble, just flicking up and up and up.
Kelly Link
#36. You were going to travel for love, without shoes, or cloak, or common sense. This is one of the things a woman can do when her lover leaves her. It's hard on the feet perhaps, but staying at home is hard on the heart, and you weren't quite ready to give up on him yet.
Kelly Link
#38. She'll take what she can get and be happy about it, because love isn't about convenience and frozen yogurt and real life. That isn't what love is about.
Kelly Link
#39. It worked because I asked justly. Magic makes judgments. Remember that.
Kelly Link
#40. There are stories about winter ghosts found tangles like lice in their lovers' hair.
Kelly Link
#41. A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.
Kelly Link
#42. What I like about narrative in general is when there is some incongruity between the form and content. Let's say, mixing up the gothic with a coming-of-age narrative. Telling a love story that's also a monster story. Mixing up superhero tropes with your monster tropes. I like category confusion.
Kelly Link
#43. Whether or not this story has a happy ending depends, of course, on who is reading it. Whether you are a wolf or a girl.
Kelly Link
#44. Tell me which you could sooner do without, love or water."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean, could you live without love, or could you live without water?"
"Why can't I have both?
Kelly Link
#45. The Bungalow 4 counselor was a twenty-year-old college student named Eric who had terrible acne and wrote poems about the local girls who worked in the kitchen and how their breasts looked lonely but also beautiful, like melted ice cream.
Kelly Link
#46. perhaps with the guardsman who had such brown eyes, and a mustache that curled up on either side of his nose like two waxed black laces, even as this guardsman, whose name you didn't ask calls out a name in his sleep that is not your name, you are dreaming about the road again. When
Kelly Link
#47. A vampire is a flexible metaphor. You know, death, sex, change, stagnation, loss of self, loss of agency, having to keep one's real self secret, the possibility of something lasting forever: love, hate, grief.
Kelly Link
#48. I'm not good at the friends thing. I'm the human equivalent of one of those baby birds that fall out of a nest and then some nice person picks the baby bird up and puts it back. Except that now the baby bird smells all wrong. I think I smell wrong.
Kelly Link
#49. Becka might have been average in L.A., but average in L.A. is Queen of Mars in the visiting room of a federal penitentiary in North Carolina.
Kelly Link
#50. As if our happiness, our good fortune, might rub off, contestants ask us for a light: they brush up against us in the halls, pull strands of hair off our clothing. Whenever we leave our bed, our room
not often
two or three are sure to be lurking just outside our door.
Kelly Link
#51. Everybody naked, nobody happy. It's Scandinavian art porn.
Kelly Link
#52. I don't think I'm cut out for a job where you have to look professionally tidy. I prefer working in my pajamas and taking showers after lunch.
Kelly Link
#53. She shone like a bright strange star shining in those empty lifeless halls, I write.
Kelly Link
#54. The zombies were like Canadians, in that they looked enough like real people at first, to fool you.
Kelly Link
#55. Everyone has a bizarre childhood and unusual life experiences, whether they know it or not. There's no such thing as a normal childhood. What's useful in writing weird fiction is learning how to understand and articulate those moments of personal, particular strangeness.
Kelly Link
#56. The face, the whole body, the way you moved in it, just a guise. You put it on, you put it off again. What was underneath belonged to you, just you, as long as you kept it hidden.
Kelly Link
#57. Most of My Friends are two-thirds water
Kelly Link
#58. I hate those movies, those books, where some guy gets to go off and have adventures and meanwhile the girl has to stay home and wait. I'm a feminist. I subscribe to Bust magazine, and I watch Buffy reruns. I don't believe in that kind of shit.
Kelly Link
#59. It's night in the Free People's World Tree Library. All the librarians are asleep, ... between the pages of their enchanted novels.
Kelly Link
#60. I think that we want to be led slightly astray when we're being told a story. Just a little wrong footed.
Kelly Link
#61. Dragons eat the things that they're curious about.
Kelly Link
#62. Sometimes a friendship is more like a war.
Kelly Link
#63. I'm grateful when stories come in a rush, although I keep an eye on them afterwards, to see whether they hold together. It's harder to judge the ones that took so long to finish. With those, I've lost perspective. Mostly I'm just glad that I can be done with them.
Kelly Link
#64. Her voice is furry and sharp, like a blanket made of needles.
Kelly Link
#65. When his writing is going well, Gordon Strangle Mars likes to wake up at 6 a.m. and go out driving. He works out new plot lines about giant spiders and keeps an eye out for abandoned couches, which he wrestles into the back of his pickup truck. Then he writes for the rest of the day.
Kelly Link
#66. You may very well ask what the goddess of love is doing in St. Andrews, writing trashy romances. Adapting.
Kelly Link
#67. Life is a series of sudden disappearances, leave-takings without the proper goodbyes.
Kelly Link
#68. When you're Dead ... you stay up all night long.
Kelly Link
#69. What Jeremy likes about showers is the way you can stand there, surrounded by water and yet in absolutely no danger of drowning, and not think about things like whether you fucked up on the Spanish assignment, or why your mother is looking so worried.
Kelly Link
#70. No wizard has ever made himself useful by magic, or, if they've tried, they've only made matters worse. No wizard ever stopped a war or mended a fence. It's better that they stay in their marshes, out of the way of worldly folk like farmers and soldiers and merchants and kings.
Kelly Link
#71. She knows, every part of her knows, that she wants to kiss him. That he wants to kiss her. All of her skin prickles with longing. Her insides fizz. (The Lady and the Fox)
Kelly Link
#72. Because love isn't just love. It's all the other stuff, too.
Kelly Link
#73. The Wizard of Oz was a humbug. He's not great and powerful. He just pretends to be great and powerful. The Wicked Witch of the West is greater and powerfuller. She's got flying monkeys. She's like a mad scientist. She even has a secret weakness. Water is like Kryptonite to her.
Kelly Link
#74. The boy is loved. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?
Kelly Link
#75. We are sitting on our honeymoon bed in the honeymoon suite. We are in a state of honeymoon, in our honey month. These words are so sweet: honey, moon. This bed is so big, we could live on it. We have been happily marooned
honey marooned
on this bed for days.
Kelly Link
#76. Part of you is always traveling faster, always traveling ahead. Even when you are moving, it is never fast enough to satisfy that part of you.
Kelly Link
#77. On old maps, cartographers would draw strange beasts around the margins and write phrases such as "Here be dragons." That's where monsters exist: in the unmapped spaces, in the places where we haven't filled in all the gaps ...
Kelly Link
#78. You have to salvage what you can, even if you're the one who buried it in the first place.
Kelly Link
#79. There's a reason why movie theatres don't encourage people to bring their goats.
Kelly Link
#80. Fox is a television character, and she isn't dead yet. But she will be, soon. She's a character on a television show called The Library. You've never seen the Library on TV, but I bet you wish you had.
Kelly Link
#82. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed and given to evil habits, or else it can be a man in his late forties who works too much, or it can be an alarm clock.
Kelly Link
#83. Only a few of the women sport pubic hair. He's never understood what that's about. Some of the men are bare, too. O tempora, o mores.
Kelly Link
#84. Our eyes are always blind when they view the future.
Kelly Link
#85. Remember, when you don't know what to do, it never hurts to play Scrabble. It's like reading the I Ching or tea leaves.
Kelly Link
#86. Hildy has resigned herself to this, that life is a series of sudden disappearences, leavetakings without the proper good-byes. Someday she too might vanish. Some days she looks forward to learning this trick.
Kelly Link
#87. When you do for other people (Fran's daddy said once upon a time when he was drunk, before he got religion) things that they could do for themselves, but they pay you to do it instead, you both will get used to it.
Kelly Link
#88. A girl from Pittsburgh was a good thing, like an anchor. Every homesick traveler should have one.
Kelly Link
#89. I'd be flattered if someone said that my work is "too weird" for them. I value the uncompliment.
Kelly Link
#90. Her chest feels very tight, as if she's suddenly full of poison. You have to keep it all inside. Like throwing yourself on a bomb to save everyone else. Except you're the bomb.
Kelly Link
#91. Jake's hair smelled like iced tea with honey in it, after all the ice has melted.
Kelly Link
#92. If you were to say a witch's chess set instead of a witch's family, there would be some truth in that. Perhaps this is true of other families as well.
Kelly Link
#93. When I'm up for an award, there are usually two or three other things on the ballot that I like better than my own fiction.
Kelly Link
