Quotes by Caitlín R. Kiernan

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

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 dont. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken.

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.

I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. Its entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

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 shes 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.

Theres always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but theres 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 were lucky were Odysseus tied up to the ships mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If were not at all lucky, were another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.

Its a myth that crazy people dont know theyre 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.

I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.

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

[L]uxury always comes at someone else’s expense. One of the many advantages of civilization is that one doesn’t generally have to see that, if one doesn’t wish. You’re free to enjoy its benefits without troubling your conscience. (Ancillary Justice)

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.

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!

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.

“And it means snapshots, because thats 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. Im rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, Im 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 its a falsehood Ive never learned to spin.”