Caitlin R. Kiernan Quotes & Sayings

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Chance takes a deep breath, fills her lungs with all the brightness getting in through the window, filling herself with that sane and ordinary air, with what she knows is real, reality to make her brave. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Dancy can hear rain beginning to fall on the tar-paper roof of the cabin. Fat summer raindrops, and it's the sweetest sound, almost, sweet as the end of a fever, as ripe as red apples. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Yeah, that's what I saw. But I learned a long time ago that some stuff I see when I touch these things, some of it can be influence by other people who touched them before me, by what those people believed. If those beliefs are strong enough, Chance, it's like they can leave impressions behind, the same way that actual events can. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Dancy closes her eyes, remembering all the times that have been so much worse than this, all the horror and shame and sorrow to give her strength. The burning parts of her no one and nothing can ever touch, the fire where her soul used to be. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Writing makes it even harder than concrete. Writing makes it hard as diamond. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

A phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of "sane" people. I don't. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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

Back home, the dank and mildewstinking halls of Quinlan Castle, and she pauses on the concrete front steps to shake the rain off Jerome's happy yellow umbrella, flaps it open and closed, open and closed, making a furious noise like the death throes of a giant bat or a pterodactyl, spraying a thousand droplets across the steps and the sidewalk. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Magick may be no more than the willful invocation of awe. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

And it means snapshots, because that's what all stories I write come down to; each is a snapshot of who I was during however many days and weeks it was written. A fictional reflection of my mind fossilized, set in paper and ink, instead of stone. Memorialized, for better or worse. This is who I was, and this, and this, and this, and that, and most times I look back and wince. I'm rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, I'm even grateful to the me of then who left a snapshot for the me of now. Maybe I should let go and join those who pretend the past is past, but it's a falsehood I've never learned to spin. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks no one is watching. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over.
Houses Under The Sea — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

In the end, it's only a story of having had her words and secrets, her confidences, turned against her by someone she once believed entirely beyond any acts of betrayal. A story of pettiness and cruelty and of the lies friends will tell when a friendship has ceased to be profitable or convenient. It is a very simple and inexpressibly complex story of cowardice ... — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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

I loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I'd take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Making a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

No strings attached," Constance said again. "Oh, there are always strings," I replied. "Whether we put them there or not. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

He swallows a soothing mouthful of Jim Beam and rubs at his face, trying to rub away the familiar regret, that he can't take back words that are already history, that have found their mark and already done their damage. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

You think one's any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that's all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it's all the same to the worms. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Chance wanting to defend her grandfather, but not about to leave the library, dustysafe sanctuary of shelves and glass cases and the musty smell of all the books, the door locked from the inside against birdnervous aunts who thought maybe a few slabs of smoked ham and a spoonful of mashed potatoes would make everything better, would make anything right again. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

That would be showing him a part of her soul, a part of her mind, that she's never risked showing anyone. The raw and squirming part that indifferent high-school counselor were always prying at, the part therapists tried to trick her into showing them for free, the part her parents hated her for. The light and the darkness behind her eyes. The soft places. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

No one ever said you have to be dead and buried to be a ghost. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I think I might have something for you today, he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Art should never be a slave to commerce, but for all working artists that's exactly what it must be. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Chance smiled back at him, and Well, can you think of anything else I could do with my life that could ever possibly be half this splendid, half this important? I'm learning to read, Deke, and not just the handful of things men have been around long enough to write down. The history of the whole damned planet is written in rocks, just lying there waiting for us to learn how to read it. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Her words, her jumbled, mad thoughts tamed or simply broken, made language, and she took another drag off the Lucky, exhaled, and read the last sentence aloud. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

So, here are my windows, stained all with me. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Listen: Love your fiction, even if you hate the act of creating that fiction, love the stories to a fault. Cry at your tragedies, laugh at your jokes, rejoice at your character's victories - or give it all up and go knit a damned sweater, instead. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

... but that was a long time ago, a long story everyone's tired of repeating, or a short story simply not worth repeating again. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

The long nub end of afternoon spent at her keyboard, her hands moving so much slower than her racing mind, The frustrating lag between her thoughts and the hunt and peck; a hot flood of ideas where there had been months of trickling, uncertain sentences, and Sadie trying to keep up with herself, wishing she'd taken typing in high school, scared that this inspiration would grow restless, impatient with her, and slink back to whatever hole it crawled out of. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Originality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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

Julia follows the beach, the sand that is so white it makes her doubt the beaches in Heaven could possibly be any whiter, the water like peacock feathers lapping at the shore, vivid green blue going hyacinth out where the sea starts getting deep. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

The divine is always abominable.
Houses Under The Sea — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I realize how arrogant it is to claim I can sort what is relevant from what is irrelevant. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I am a dead woman. Dead and insane. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

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 — Caitlin R. Kiernan

All too infrequently do I encounter a new voice as delightful, compelling, and intelligent as that of Molly Tanzer. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I shouldn't be this tired when I try to find my way back to the tree. I'll rest for a while, and I'll drift back down to the orchard, and the stone wall. I'll lie in my bed and wait. Someone has turned the ponies out again. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

Stop it," Chance says out loud, angryraw, scornful voice that she hardly recognizes, "Jesus, just fucking stop it," but she's crying again, and her eyes burn, and she's so goddamn sick of the sound, the smell and saltbland flavor of her own useless tears. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

You love someone. You don't leave her to drown. And you don't tell her she's crazier than she already knows that she is! — Caitlin R. Kiernan