Whitley Strieber Quotes & Sayings

A real stunner. Want to get swept up on a journey you will never forget and never quite escape? Open THE RITUAL OF ILLUSION and let its magic leap out, grab you, take you places unlike you have ever known. — Whitley Strieber

The truth is, everything ultimately comes down to the relationship between the reader and the writer and the characters. Does or does not a character address moral being in a universal and important way? If it does, then it's literature. — Whitley Strieber

The Sleep lasted six hours. For most of that time John lay beside Miriam watching the shadows. — Whitley Strieber

Instead of shunning the darkness, we can face straight into it with an open mind. When we do that, the unknown changes. Fearful things become understandable and a truth is suggested: the enigmatic presence of the human mind winks back from the dark. WHITLEY STRIEBER, COMMUNION — Whitley Strieber

films like The Never-Ending Story (1984), Stranger than Fiction (2006), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011). Have you seen any of these films? Then you understand hermeneutics. In each case, the story revolves around a protagonist engaging his own life as a fictional story being written either in this world or in another, seemingly by someone else. As he reads and interprets the text of his life, however, he discovers that its story or plot changes. He discovers the circle or loop of hermeneutics. He discovers that as he engages his cultural script as text creatively and critically he is rereading and rewriting himself. He is changing the story. — Whitley Strieber

In a reality made of energy, thoughts may literally be things. What if it was intended that we create our own realities after death? — Whitley Strieber

I wondered if I might not be in the grip of demons, if they were not making me suffer for their own purposes, or simply for their enjoyment. — Whitley Strieber

It is very easy to claim a theory of everything if you get to decide what that everything is. It is very easy to explain everything on the table if you have put everything you cannot explain underneath it in the wastebasket. — Whitley Strieber

I became entirely given over to extreme dread. The fear was so powerful that it seemed to make my personality completely evaporate ... 'Whitley' ceased to exist. What was left was a body and a state of raw fear so great that it swept about me like a thick, suffocating curtain, turning paralysis into a condition that seemed close to death ... I died and a wild animal appeared in my place. — Whitley Strieber

Nobody knows the age of the Sphinx. There are those who claim that it is far older than the four thousand years attributed to it by conventional thinking. They have interesting reasons. First, it has been weathered, according to geologists, by the action of water, not wind. This fact is revealed by the condition of its sandstone body. According to John Anthony West, it must have been built long before the time of the pharaohs because it shows evidence of water erosion. Dr. Robert Schoch, a Boston University geologist, has confirmed the validity of this theory, and his dating was endorsed by three hundred other geologists at the 1992 convention of the Geological Society of America. — Whitley Strieber

In the eyes of the others we who met them saw ourselves. And there were demons there. — Whitley Strieber

In them was not the savage blankness of the reptile species. Instead there was something far worse - burning, unquenchable rage mixed with the self-mocking irony of great intelligence. — Whitley Strieber

Increasingly I felt as if I were entering a struggle that might even be more than life and death. It might be a struggle for my soul, my essence, or whatever part of me might have reference to the eternal. There are worse things than death, I suspected ... so far the word demon had never been spoken among the scientists and doctors who were working with me ... Alone at night I worried about the legendary cunning of demons ... At the very least I was going stark, raving mad. — Whitley Strieber

This time, there was the ghost of a reptile in Szatson's smile. 'I don't handle little problems. — Whitley Strieber

I think he's wonderful and strange and kind of like a poem. — Whitley Strieber

As far as the Wagners were concerned, Kaye would just disappear. Within a month she would become another statistic, one of thousands of teenagers who walk out on their families every year. — Whitley Strieber

The upheavals of adolescence silenced 'A Christmas Carol' for a few years. I became a firebrand atheist. Christmas - humbug! Too commercial! Then I became an agnostic. Christmas was a pro-forma affair, basically a chore. Buy mother a book, dad a new tie, my brother and sister small gifts. Pretend thanks for the fountain pens and shirts I received. — Whitley Strieber

I've always been interested in definitions, because in the Bible, the Ten Commandments are there but there's no real clear definition of what sin is, in a fundamental sense - how we can use the words to evaluate our lives as we go along: Am I doing something that is ethically good? Am I being worthwhile in my life at this moment? — Whitley Strieber

We have only faith to guide us, say the theologians. Which faith? It is my acceptance that what we call evidence, and whatever we think we mean by intuition and faith are the phenomena of eras, and that the best of minds, or minds best in rapport with the dominant motif of an era, have intuition and faith and belief that depend upon what is called evidence, relatively to pagan gods, then to the god of the christians, and then to godlessness - and then to whatever is coming next. . . . . If now, affairs upon this earth be fluttering upon the edge of a new era, and I give expression to coming thoughts of that era, thousands of other minds are changing, and all of us will take on new thoughts concordantly, and see, as important evidence, piffle of the past. CHARLES FORT, LO! — Whitley Strieber

I felt an absolutely indescribable sense of menace. It was hell on earth to be there [in the presence of the entities], and yet I couldn't move, couldn't cry out, couldn't get away. I'd lay as still as death, suffering inner agonies. Whatever was there seemed so monstrously ugly, so filthy and dark and sinister. Of course they were demons. They had to be. And they were here and I couldn't get away. — Whitley Strieber

Every time someone ends a prayer in the Western world they say Amen - that is the name of an Egyptian god associated with completion. So we're still praying to their gods. — Whitley Strieber

I put the copy of 'A Christmas Carol' that my grandfather had first read to me 60 years ago on my desk, and I began to write. The result, for better or for worse, is the 'Christmas Spirits.' I plan to read it to my grandson. — Whitley Strieber

The tiny lines extending from the corners of his eyes were no illusion. He touched his cheek and felt a delicate dryness, a subtle stiffening. Weren't there also circles under his eyes, and even more lines around his mouth? — Whitley Strieber

God is wild; I am tame ... Night falls and an age ends ... We call and are answered through the thick foliage, by voices too strange to be our own ... — Whitley Strieber

who are we, that we so conceal ourselves from ourselves? — Whitley Strieber

Would we, if we could, educate and sophisticate pigs, geese, cattle? Would it be wise to establish diplomatic relation with the hen that now functions, satisfied with mere sense of achievement by way of compensation? I think we're property. — Whitley Strieber

The interesting thing about fiction from a writer's standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you. — Whitley Strieber

Why were my visitors so secretive, hiding themselves behind my consciousness. I could only conclude that they were using me and did not want me to know why ... What if they were dangerous? Then I was terribly dangerous because I was playing a role in acclimatizing people to them. — Whitley Strieber

the fundamentally paradoxical ways that our very subjectivities are constituted: as cultural scripts, as texts written before us as us. It is confusing being a novel, a piece of fiction that considers itself a simple fact. — Whitley Strieber

Every Christmas now for years, I have found myself wondering about the point of the celebration. As the holiday has become more ecumenical and secular, it has lost much of the magic that I remember so fondly from childhood. — Whitley Strieber

Rather, a prophecy is a warning. Its purpose is to identify dangerous future situations that are inevitable given present conditions, so that those conditions can be changed. In this sense, the best of all prophets must always be wrong, because the dangers that they see are averted by their prophecies. — Whitley Strieber

Dr. Ian Stevenson, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia Medical School, has published five volumes of case histories, mostly of children under the age of four who have detailed memories of past lives. Some of them even describe the process of dying and being reincarnated. The vivid detail of the best cases, all verified by Dr. Stevenson and his assistants, suggests strongly that reincarnation is a real process - and therefore, by implication, that the soul is real. — Whitley Strieber

We're not interested in anyone saying the sky's falling, but David Nabhan is a rational man who has studied earthquakes seriously and has intelligent, useful information to offer. — Whitley Strieber

The Mars Committee and its various offshoots have struggled consistently over the years on behalf of the public interest. Their work is presented with great documentary force in Dr. Stanley V McDaniel's 1993 book, The McDaniel Report, published by North Atlantic Books of Berkeley, California. This report should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of public science. — Whitley Strieber

Old enough to know better, but too young to care. — Whitley Strieber

Maybe that's what the quasars that stand sentinel at the end of the universe are all about - they are the spots where people like Socrates and Christ dug through; they are windows into bright and terrible wisdom. They are warnings. — Whitley Strieber

No
doubt, I wont be believed, and thats all right, because, in a sense, it
leaves me free in ways that belief would not. — Whitley Strieber

I'm not so sure that horror should be dismissed as something less than literature. — Whitley Strieber

She drove her chariot like a centurion. — Whitley Strieber

What we need to do now," he mused, "is make better sci-fi movies so that we can have better contact experiences." That is hermeneutics. — Whitley Strieber

I've got lots of books sitting here that have never been published because nobody could make any marketing sense of them. — Whitley Strieber

It is one thing for the government to reveal that UFOs are intelligently guided objects of unknown origin and another to assume that this means that "they" are here. Should we ever come into more general contact with what I encountered - assuming that is even possible - they will not be offering us plans for a starship, or a trade in exotic electronics. What will be on offer, I would suggest, is a journey into a whole new understanding of reality and the part we play in it. The "alien" is as much a herald from the dark of the universe as it is a signal from the depths of our own minds. The — Whitley Strieber

Debates about the imagination and its role in human knowledge go back in the West to ancient Greece around the secrets and enigmas of the revealed "symbol" and its relationship to the more plodding ways of reason and rational knowledge. The most recent chapter of that larger conversation goes back to the eighteenth century and what we now call the Romantic movement. The poets and philosophers of the latter asked: What is the imagination? Is it simply a spinner of fantasies? Or can it also become a "window" of revealed truths from some other deeper part of the soul or world? Or, better yet, like some secret two-way mirror in a modern-day police station, is the imagination both, depending on whether one is looking at or through its reflecting surface, that is, depending on which side of it one is standing? Can one stand on both sides? — Whitley Strieber

Eumenes had been with her more than 400 years, Lollia nearly as long. Until now not one of her transformations had failed to last 200 years. Was she getting worse at it, or was the strength of the human stock in decline? — Whitley Strieber

The old world was destroyed because of its own greed and secretiveness. Those least evolved rose to the top, as happens here. Your leaders, as you call them, are all people with damaged senses of self-worth. The damaged goods run the civilization. That's why it cannot last."
"Abraham Lincoln was damaged goods?"
"The need to lead is a symptom. — Whitley Strieber