Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.

Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks no one is watching.

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.

I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.

"The divine is always abominable.
"Houses Under The Sea

I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That's the paradox of me.

...and for the first time in her life the tears that had always seemed to flow so easily, had always been there, eager to soothe any loss or ache, had refused to come, and somehow, that had been the most frightening thing of all.

Used 'em all up on trifling shit, and now there's nothing left to cry. Like something her mother used to say or maybe a schoolteacher had said a long time ago. Stop bawling or someday you won't be able to cry, someone you love will die and you won't ever be able to stop hurting.

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.

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.

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.

"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."

Eva was only a slut. She never had the requisite motivation to be anything so useful or lucrative as a whore.

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