We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
It makes me angry sometimes, it’s a visceral thing – how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren’t genuine, but because they are; because you’ve said them so many times, your ‘principles,’ your ‘ideals’ – and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
But he doesn’t love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love – the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn’t happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another’s faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn’t happen.
You can’t deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the ’perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.
For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination’s caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.
Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.
Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!
Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own.
To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead – either you are, or you are not.
As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.
Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.
I’d like to be your friend – but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me.
To claim – to claim repeatedly – that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numberous others, will say it for you.
Marianne laughed. But you can’t disappoint me! I don’t love you.
The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem.” This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.
The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for ‘serious literary’ fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Then the noise faded and Legs squinted up at the sky, the moon so bright you’d never think it could be merely rock like the earth’s common rock and lifeless, merely reflected light from an invisible sun and not a powerful living light of its own...