Laird Barron Quotes & Sayings
Enjoy the top 60 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Laird Barron.
Famous Quotes By Laird Barron
Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you. — Laird Barron
Conrad might be on his way to achieving godhead and wouldn't that be a kick in the ass? — Laird Barron
I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair. — Laird Barron
The light in the gallery changed subtly and he whirled and saw someone approaching him from between the exhibit cases. The individual moved with alarming speed, bent low to the floor, but straightening as he or she drew nearer. Unfolding ... — Laird Barron
Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man's upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart. — Laird Barron
Pulver's skills as a post-Beat visionary are in rare form. A House of Hollow Wounds is a thrilling foray into the dark frontier of the weird. — Laird Barron
You create your characters, set things in motion, and then let those characters and the situations they encounter tell you how they're going to end up. — Laird Barron
The elder Navarro had believed, as did the ancient philosophers of the Far East, that the cosmos ultimately revealed itself as a repeating pattern, an infinitely replicating superstructure contained and embodied in a galaxy, down to a drop of blood. — Laird Barron
A Pretty Mouth is a fine and stylish collection that pays homage to the tradition of the weird while blazing its own sinister mark. Tanzer's debut is as sharp and polished as any I've seen. — Laird Barron
That really your kind of crowd? These effete psychos who want to relive the seedier aspects of the Roman empire?
These are the kind of folks who own tropical islands. Hell, some of them run banana republics for fun. They want a spectacle, I can fill the bill.
Ah yes. Dictators, inbred nobility and other megalomaniacs. Swell friends you got there.
It's a living. — Laird Barron
If the sky, by sinister alchemy, or diabolical prestidigitation, transformed into a mirror of the mother sea, the primordial cradle; and if leviathans swam that breadth and hovered, softly undulating over the teaming habitations of the globe, feasting; what should you wear? — Laird Barron
Reality was a makeshift prop, an amalgamation of agreed-upon conjecture, a consensus of self-limiting parameters and paradigms made palatable by endless speculation fueled by madness and hope and no mean amount of good dope. — Laird Barron
Money was a problem. Money was always a problem no matter how many bones he crushed or how much blood he let or dues he paid. The fucking rent was always due. — Laird Barron
I am abroad in the night with my servants. We come to smoke the northern lights, to rape the Wendigo, to melt igloos with streams of hot, bloody piss. To see and see."
"Oh. You're a bit east. — Laird Barron
Curiosity did not kill the cat all by itself. — Laird Barron
The look in your eyes, boy. You're afraid. A man like you is afraid, I take stock." "I've known some fearless men. Hunted lions with them. A few of those gents forgot that Mother Nature is more of a killer than we humans will ever be and wound up getting chomped. She wants our blood, our bones, our goddamned guts. Fear is healthy. — Laird Barron
Take a picture of God, tack it on the wall and see who bows. — Laird Barron
During my adolescence, our family dwelt in rural Alaska. We were dirt poor, Depression-era poor. Tarpaper shack and kerosene lamps. In those days I read because that's all I had. I wrote because that's all I had. — Laird Barron
Autumn, like Alzheimer's, turns everything strange and unfamiliar, and when you look for the shape of the real hidden within, you find only a promise of the winter to come. — Laird Barron
The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it. — Laird Barron
Skullcrack City messes with your mind the way William Burroughs or a bellyful of hallucinogens will do. I'm a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he's been bringing it for years. This time, though, it's different. He's burst into the clear and is taking seven-league strides across the literary landscape. — Laird Barron
The amplified ukulele music was giving me a migraine. — Laird Barron
Robert Service once said dying is easy, it's the keeping on living that's hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations. — Laird Barron
I cannot explain, nor must an artist defend his work or elucidate in such a way the reeling audience can fathom, brutes that they are. — Laird Barron
But art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art - the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few — Laird Barron
He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long. — Laird Barron
For they were the stuff of nightmares; maggoty abominations possessed of incalculable and vile intellect that donned flesh and spines of men and beasts to shield themselves from the sun and enable themselves to walk upright instead of merely slithering. — Laird Barron
It's about walking, or crawling as the case may be, through this messy existence with eyes open. It's about squeezing a fistful of shit and praying for a diamond. — Laird Barron
The subconscious is a doorway to the infinite. — Laird Barron
The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart. — Laird Barron
In fact, candy was at the top of the list of things she was supposed to avoid, especially holiday treats from strangers. But there were also dire warnings about public toilets, dogs (even on leashes), convenience stores (especially at night), unsupervised children and teens, electrical outlets (during storms), unlit rooms, steep staircases, carnival rides, banquet or buffet food, cocktails on a date, and all weather conditions. — Laird Barron
Ramirez walked ahead with a torch he'd fashioned from a stick and some rags and by that queer and reddish light, devils, or the shadows of devils hooked to the shoes of the men and capered across the stony earth. — Laird Barron
Mom was all about hellfire and brimstone. Her Old Testament God was a colossal, ancient brute, a maelstrom of blood and fire, of appetite and wrath. — Laird Barron
The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he'd submerged himself in work and writing and books. — Laird Barron
Your father had other plans for you. Alas, his breakdown and untimely demise derailed everything he'd worked to accomplish. He would not approve of your quixotic pursuit of Imogene. She became embroiled in his vendetta with the forces of darkness, as it were. No sense following her into oblivion."
Conrad said, "You talk a lot for a guy on oxygen. — Laird Barron
He was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered. — Laird Barron
Nostalgia, it's nothing but pain," Robert said. "It's memory poisoned by the anguish of loss. — Laird Barron
Arthur said, "Let's be cool and not get busted. I advise rest and relaxation, and definitely a bath. You guys smell like booze and cheap whores."
Dred sniffed. "He's right. We do. Woof. — Laird Barron
Everyone is looking for the answer. They do not want to find the answer, trust me. Unfortunately, the answer will find them. Life - it's like one of those unpleasant nature documentaries. To be the cameraman instead of the subjects, eh? — Laird Barron
My paternal grandfather was a failed novelist. He stacked boxes of rejected manuscripts in a closet. — Laird Barron
Presumption is a leading cause of death. — Laird Barron
Mac, are we having an adventure? Is someone going to shoot at me? Am I going to be kidnapped again? Locked in a trunk and dropped into the sea? Experimented on with growth hormones? Chased by a lunatic in a mechanical werewolf getup? It sure feels like we're having an adventure."
"Yep, we're having an adventure," Mac said. — Laird Barron
Mom and Dad were bibliophiles. Dad shared his father's love of westerns, Mom favored the likes of Zelazny and Heinlein, Howard and Burroughs. We owned several hundred books stored in trunks that comprised our portable library. — Laird Barron
When, you wonder, does Sarah go west and build her rambling mansion? Not yet. Soon, but not yet. First, her husband has to do a blood-coughing two-step off this mortal coil. — Laird Barron
Hacked to pieces by a band of hillbilly satanists" hadn't ever made my list of imagined ways of getting rubbed out - and as the Samurai warriors of yore meditated on a thousand demises, I too had imagined a whole lot of ways of kicking. Helios Augustus's candle flame flickered in the black opening. He — Laird Barron
Neither light nor heat could withstand it; to gaze into that nullity and to comprehend its scope was to have one's humanity snuffed. Only the inhuman thrived in out there in deep black. — Laird Barron
When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time - at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I'm the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I broke the mold under my heel. — Laird Barron
The universe dilated within him, above him. Something like joy stirred in Lancaster's being, a sublime ecstasy born of terror. His heart felt as if it might burst, might leap from his chest. His cheeks were wet. Drops of blood glittered on his bare arms, the backs of his hands, his thighs, his feet. Black as the blackest pearls come undone from a string, the droplets lifted from him, drifted from him like a slow motion comet tail, and floated toward the road, the fields. For the first time in an age he heard nothing but the night sounds of crickets, his own breath. His skull was quiet. — Laird Barron
Do you supplicate plutonium? Do you sing hymns to uranium? We bask in the corona of an insensate majesty. In its sway we seek to lay the foundation blocks of a new city, a new civilization. We're pioneers. Our frontier is the grand wasteland between Alpha and Omega. — Laird Barron
I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I'm rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my "essential saltes" as it were, I'm the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang. — Laird Barron
- Only fools and the dead never change their mind. — Laird Barron
Ye wanna steer clear o' 'im and 'is little friends. Ye shall come to a nasty end nosin' 'bout that gent."
The Spy knew the refrain. He wondered aloud as to the nature of these little friends.
"Ain't ever seen 'em, just 'eard of 'em. Cripples and deformed ones. Some ain't got no arms or legs is what I 'ear. they crawl along behind 'im, see? Wrigglin' in the dirt all ruddy worm-like."
"He's got an entourage of folk without arms," the Spy said, raising his brows toward the brim of his cocked hat. "Or legs. Following him wherever he goes."
"Some got arms, some don't. Some got legs, some don't. Some got neither. That's what I 'ear." The farmer shrugged, made the sign of warding again, and would say no more on the matter. — Laird Barron
There's real evil, Mr Honey. Not that existential crap, either. — Laird Barron
A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. — Laird Barron
Wisdom devours the weak. — Laird Barron
The cold impassive stars didn't bother him so much as the gaps between them did. — Laird Barron
Actually, coyotes are much scarier than wolves. Sneaky, sneaky little suckers. Eat you up. Lick the blood all up. — Laird Barron