Gemma Files Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 37 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Gemma Files.
Famous Quotes By Gemma Files
...most ghosts are a rag and a bone and a hank of hair at best--a memory fragment stuck on continual loop, just dust and PKE and water-vapour with no real "there" there. Leftover fragments of psychic energy deluded into believing in their own personality; an echo cobbled together from memory and pain, with no self-awareness as such 'cept what we give them. Survival instinct, with no survival. — Gemma Files
As time passes, the cast and crew go the way of all flesh, though their celluloid echoes remain--walking, talking, fighting, fucking. After enough time, every person you see onscreen will have died, transformed through the magic of cinema into a collection of visible memories: light on a screen, pixels on a videotape, information on a DVD. We bring them back every time we start a movie, and they live again, reflected in our eyes. It's a cruel sort of immortality, I guess, though it probably beats the alternative. — Gemma Files
These narrative structures have to be thought out beforehand, you see--strategized, methodically according to content. Because a story, in the main, dictates its own telling. — Gemma Files
The central question of any execution: do you want the hood on or off? Would you rather see it coming? Or would you rather simply drift away, cocooned in warm darkness, stinking of nothing but yourself? A kind, familiar place to hide in, just before the snap, the crackle? Or the pop? — Gemma Files
the tragedy is that the world never does end, ever. That it goes on & on, forcing us to go along as well, until at last there is nothing else, nothing more. Until there is only what was, same as what is and what will be--Only the truth, which never changes. Truth not made flesh but image, for anyone to see. — Gemma Files
I tend to go back and forth between old favourites and "new" stuff, some of which could easily be by authors I've hitherto heard about but haven't had the chance to catch up with. — Gemma Files
I live for books that produce a mood of gathering creepy fascination, a true descent in the Weird. — Gemma Files
I'm pretty sure Mom and Dad didn't see me coming, either: the kid with the black moods, the kid whose mind was always elsewhere, flinching from real life as from a bruise. Who wanted to lay a fiction-filter on top of everything and pretend it was something else just to keep the sheer disappointment of it all bearable: this limited, empirical experience of ours, trapped inside a decaying shell of meat, mainly able to perceive that nothing lasts, even in our most pleasurable moments. — Gemma Files
The problem with all numinous things is that you can't just take somebody's word about them, especially the ones you're warned away from. You have to look at them, eventually, to know they're really there. You look at them even though you know it's not a good idea to. You can't not. In the end, you will always look at the thing you're told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists. — Gemma Files
But you're a man, Chess. You're tough."
Chess snorted. "Ever seen the inside of a birthin' room? Stick a pin in the map almost anywhere, you'll find ten women tougher'n me - and you, for that matter. — Gemma Files
Rhythm becoming thought, thought becoming memory; memory, which tends to shuck itself, to peel away. You get older, look back through a child's tunnel vision, and realize you never knew the whole that tied the details together. You were just along for the ride, moving from experience to experience, a flat spectacle, some kind of guideless tour. You remember--or think you remember--what happened, but not where, or why. What you did, but not with who. Details fade. People's names get lost in the white noise. — Gemma Files
The day Chess Pargeter looks t' engage himself with any woman's situation'll be a cold one in the Hot Place for sure — Gemma Files
So many individuals in different places, all with the same good idea. All, in their own ways, attempting to use light on a wall to open a window into another world. And how odd is it that the two guys who made the first viable motion picture happened to have a surname that means "light"? Still just coincidence? — Gemma Files
I've always wanted to write about a "haunted" film, something imbued with a malign, potentially fatal attraction, an image which poisons everyone who's unfortunate enough to view it. — Gemma Files
I prefer my prose evocative rather than simply effective, with a bit of poetry to it. — Gemma Files
So tell me: were you born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each us born with a hole?....Born with a hole and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not 'til you've tried 'em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over....You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up let it swell and swell 'til there's nothing left but tension, nothing left but what's left over--the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around. — Gemma Files
it's the things you don't see, in this world or any other--the hidden things, unseen, lost between frames--that will always make all the difference. — Gemma Files
In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person's dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted. — Gemma Files
When the witness is ready, the ghost will appear. When things wear thin. — Gemma Files
But sometimes I do wonder if I'm love-blind the way some people are colour-blind, or most people are ghost-blind. If love (true or false, thick or thin, requited or un-) really is the only glue ever mortars our sad hearts' bricks together, and me not swift enough to recognize the label any time I happened to pass it by.
Because: living is transience, after all--people aren't really permanent 'til they're dead, no matter what you might've felt for 'em beforehand. Always changing... — Gemma Files
Yeah, that's right, Doc: I'm Chess Pargeter, he's Ed Morrow-this is a gun, so's this. Now, I'm just gonna go outside and kill that big bastard, and if I come back in here and find Ed ain't been fixed in the interim, you best believe I will end you. Got that? — Gemma Files
The primal sin of those like myself, mes amis, is that because we were once people who acted like beasts, we are forever cursed to be beasts who know they were once men. ("In The Poor Girl Taken By Surprise") — Gemma Files
The Idea of Ghost, like the Idea of North. A mere looped whisper, in darkness or in light. And no matter what this person may have been like before he or she died, no matter what they--specifically--might have wanted, ghosts only really want one thing: you, with them.
Not to be alone. Not to be trapped. Not to be where they are. Not to be. — Gemma Files
For a thought cannot be un-thought, anymore than the world can be un-made, & thus we can never escape the consequences of our mistake, not without great price, & cost, & pain. Or perhaps not even then. — Gemma Files
Free will, that bitch of a thing. Given the freedom to choose, we human beings will always make the wrong choice, every damn time. — Gemma Files
Being a ghost is like being invisible, so being invisible must be like being a ghost. Like being inside the shadow, always blundering towards people with your hands out, angry that can't see to comfort you. — Gemma Files
The Asian idea is that what remains behind after death by violence is less the murdered person his or herself than an echo created by the moment of the person's death--a rip in the fabric of space and time itself. A doppelganger husk, ectoplasm with pretensions. Not "so and so's ghost" so much as just a ghost. Or just ..."ghost. — Gemma Files
stories lie hidden inside other stories, and we always know more about any given thing than we think we do, even if the only thing we know is nothing. — Gemma Files
Like a long black hood or so high coming down over your head, too slow to measure or even to notice. And each successive layer of the hood is only mesh, perfectly see-through...bust as they fold one over the other (over the other, over the other), your world gets more dim, dull, chill, and awful, almost beyond endurance. "Normal" getting worse, always and steadily, as "normal" is--so often--wont to do — Gemma Files
Miracles, black, white, and grey all over. Like light on a wall, telling a story; like magic. Like cinema itself. — Gemma Files
Funny word, that: "fault." As in San Andreas. The crack through which one world intersects with the next, or vice versa. This crack in my head, still gaping open--a magnet, a haematoma, a dark and spreading pool. A cigarette-burn hole in the fabric of everything I see, or hear, or do; right in the middle, impossible to mend, impossible to disguise. Impossible to ignore. — Gemma Files
Yeah, well, maybe magic's like that. Metaphor made real. — Gemma Files
I could see where the faded ink intersected with its surface, half-absorbed but half not, rendering part of every word a mere whisper, the shadow left behind when all its thicker parts had rotted away. — Gemma Files
I will always want to earn what I get, however much it hurts; that I want it because it hurts, because pain gives life a pain, and without it life isn't even death, just . . . nothingness. — Gemma Files
It amazed Chess how he'd really believed, almost all along, that there was nothing he'd miss, leaving this world. Only the whole of it, you ass-stupid fool.
Every bit, the living and the dead, and then some; hot sun on his back, the wind and the rain, full-out galloping into battle, feel of his guns in hand, a good hard fuck. Getting drunk - on absinthe, anger, blood. Stomping twice on some enemy's face for good measure, and laughing while he did it; the sound of Asher Rook's voice preaching, or Yancey's, singing. Ed's heartbeat under his cheek. — Gemma Files
no matter it's actual narrative content, every movie is a ghost story. A film's production forms a time capsule, becoming a static window into a particular moment of a particular era. Even period pieces tell you more about the times they were made in than the times they depict — Gemma Files