Benjamin Percy Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 43 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Benjamin Percy.
Famous Quotes By Benjamin Percy
You can't teach talent, but you can teach people how to read strenuously and mimic the moves of rock-star writers so that they eventually accumulate a toolbox of skills. — Benjamin Percy
My voice dropped when I was 14. And when I was 14, I might have weighed 75 pounds. So you can imagine how strange that must have been: like James Earl Jones speaking through a sock puppet. — Benjamin Percy
When she thinks of the toxins built up inside of her from so many years of eating carelessly, of the resentment that has grown steadily over fifteen years of marriage, of the stretch marks and the varicose veins that came from two pregnancies, only one of them fulfilled, she thinks the inside of her body must tell a story like a tree. Were she to break open a bone, perhaps it would look like the inside of a coffee mug - riddled with lines, stained with brown blotches. — Benjamin Percy
There is no cure for prions. They are a protein-based disease that, among other things, targets and transforms your brain. The symptoms reveal themselves differently in each host, and you might go months or you might go years before you realize you're infected. — Benjamin Percy
I want to build as many worlds as possible - each a version of ours with a crack running through it - and not be anchored to any of them. — Benjamin Percy
Fight back. Bite back. — Benjamin Percy
My voice is rather quirky. It's abysmally low. People often think I'm putting it on at first. Think drunk Darth Vader. Or Barry White singing country. It suits my dark material. When I do readings, I really play it up and go subterranean. I can make the phone book sound terrifying. — Benjamin Percy
The USDA labs in Ames, Iowa, are level-four security clearance. Every nasty thing you can imagine is stored there. Ground zero for the apocalypse. And there's a day care right across the street. — Benjamin Percy
I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools. — Benjamin Percy
Transformation is forbidden. — Benjamin Percy
Fear beats logic every time, — Benjamin Percy
They wear masks that hide how hairy they are on the inside. — Benjamin Percy
The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man's quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness. — Benjamin Percy
The letting of blood, for him, like the letting of semen. — Benjamin Percy
People talk about me as masculine. Because of the way I walk and talk and crank out pull-ups and smell like bacon. — Benjamin Percy
He feels the darkness of the grave pressing around the fire and infecting his vision so that there seems to be no separation between the living and the dead, a child born with a mud wasp's nest for a heart and its eyes already pocketed with dust, ready to be clapped into a box and dropped down a hole. — Benjamin Percy
Yes, I grew up with guns. For my 16th birthday, in fact, I received a .357 instead of a car. But there was nothing playful about them; they were tools. My parents went through a back-to-the-land phase. Most of our vegetables and fruits came from our own garden. — Benjamin Percy
The girl remains on the ground. He looks at her and she looks at him and the air feels at once static and loaded, as if there is some kind of undersound his ear can't quite decipher. Like after a bell rings. That's how it is between them. There is something celestial about her, her skin a pale color, but a paleness of the softest gray-white imaginable, as if she had been soaking for years in a bath of moonlight. — Benjamin Percy
It's still incredibly hard. Not just honing my craft but kicking down doors, getting my work published. Early on, I could have wallpapered my house with all the rejection letters sent my way. I put thousands of hours and pages into four novels that never saw the light of day. — Benjamin Percy
It's like this. Terror might make someone kill, but love will make someone die. People die for love. They would give up anything for love, even their life. And don't you see, that's a denial of the most basic of all human instincts: survival. — Benjamin Percy
People like to pigeonhole. People like to label - not just books and movies, but everything in their life. If people want to call me 'literary horror,' I guess that's fine. What I'm trying to do is be both thrilling and thought-provoking. — Benjamin Percy
I wanted it to be as multi-windowed as possible, so that the reader felt like they were seeing all the different ways in to a big haunted house. — Benjamin Percy
Writing is an act of empathy. You are occupying and understanding a point of view that might be alien to your own
and work is often the keyhole through which you peer. — Benjamin Percy
I think everyone can relate to the werewolf myth - because we've all, as a result of alcohol, drugs, exhaustion, rage, gone off the leash and come to regret it later. I appeal to this psychologically - the unleashed id - but with a biological cause; I'm hopefully making possible supernatural circumstances. — Benjamin Percy
Just about every weekend when I was growing up, we would throw rods and rifles and tents and shovels and pickaxes into the back of the truck and then head off to the side of a mountain or the bottom of a canyon. Hiking, fishing, hunting, rock-hounding: this is how my parents passed the time. — Benjamin Percy
Novels will remain my meat and potatoes, what sustain me imaginatively. — Benjamin Percy
people who read short stories love endings that make them want to gargle with Drano or nosedive off a skyscraper. But — Benjamin Percy
Or are you exclusively "artful" because it's easier to excuse your sloppiness as purposeful? — Benjamin Percy
I can write ten or twelve screenplays in the time it takes me to write one novel. This allows me to offload all of my stories. But it's also not as creatively fulfilling. — Benjamin Percy
What matters is hunger. Appetite. In this way I have become what I behold. — Benjamin Percy
The world is a sewer of lies. We're all up to our necks in the sweet shit of it. — Benjamin Percy
I grew up in western Oregon, just outside Eugene, on 27 wooded acres that served as my playground. — Benjamin Percy
I don't flinch from darkness, but I've always been bothered by what I call gore-nography. — Benjamin Percy
I grew up on genre. If it had a dragon on the cover, I was interested. But horror, especially, really gripped me in its bony fist. — Benjamin Percy
Her husband once said that he believed some sort of mathematical equation could be applied to life - since the longer you lived, the greater its seeming velocity. She always attributed this to familiarity. If you kept the same habits - and if you lived in the same place, worked in the same place - then you no longer spent a lot of time noticing. Noticing things - and trying to make sense of them - is what makes time remarkable. Otherwise, life blurs by, as it does now, so that she has difficulty keeping track of time at all, one day evaporating into the next. — Benjamin Percy
He hurried out into the yard in time to see the moon lit red, like some new sun swung into orbit. — Benjamin Percy
We wore headlamps and the sight of us bobbing up the hill or zipping perilously down it had the look of busy stars, as if the night sky had come down to join us in our play. — Benjamin Percy
Plagues don't just kill people - and that's what lobos is, a plague - they kill humanity. — Benjamin Percy
If he sees his fellow humans as anything more than complicated animals. Not so different from a deer or a wolf, knitted together with the same sinew but in another design. — Benjamin Percy
I travel often, so my routine is always getting scrambled. But on a standard sort of day, I get up at 6, pack lunches, hustle the kids off to school, then brew a pot of coffee and head downstairs to the dungeon, as I call it: my cobwebby office in the basement. — Benjamin Percy