Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Writing makes it even harder than concrete. Writing makes it hard as diamond.

"Some stories don't have endings," she says. "In some stories, there aren't even answers."

I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface — the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin — there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.

Wanting to be drunk, needing to stay sober.

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.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in.

"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."

Tem cheiro de poeira e de tempo

The best foreshadowing never seems like foreshadowing.

A normalidade é um comprimido amargo do qual reclamamos.

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.

[L]uxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience. (Ancillary Justice)