Daryl Gregory > Quotes

“The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest? To even make it into the finals? Never mind that memory rigged the game, airbrushed the flaws from its contestants, while the present had to shuffle into the spotlight unaided, all pockmarked with mundanities and baggy with annoyances.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“Pretending to be normal made life so difficult.”
― Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine

“..."I might be entertaining the idea of tamping down my nihilism. Just a bit. Not because life is not meaningless—I think that’s inarguable. It’s just that the constant awareness of its pointlessness is exhausting. I wouldn’t mind being oblivious again. I’d love to feel the wind in my face and think, just for minute, that I’m not going to crash into the rocks.”

“You’re saying you’d like to be happy.”
― Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine

“Maybe everyone in the world was this inconsistent, this fragmented. All we could see of each other -- all we could see of ourselves -- was a ragged person-shaped outline, a game of connect-the-dots without enough dots.”
― Daryl Gregory, Pandemonium

“She believed that people were captains of their own destiny. He agreed, as long as it was understood that every captain was destined to go down with the ship, and there wasn't a damned thing you could do about it.”
― Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine

“That morning, while Mom had fought with Grandpa, Aunt Sel had asked me to bring her a glass of wine—it was nine in the morning—and when I’d delivered it she’d handed me a ten dollar bill and said, “I dislike children, but I do appreciate decent service.”
― Daryl Gregory, Harrison Squared

“Duty eats free will for breakfast.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“Love at first sight is a myth, but thundering sexual attraction at first sight is hard science.”
― Daryl Gregory, Afterparty

“A monster crosses over into the everyday world. The mortals struggle and show great courage, but it’s no use. The monster kills first the guilty, then the innocent, until finally only one remains. The Last Boy, the Last Girl. There is a final battle. The Last One suffers great wounds, but in the final moment vanquishes the monster. Only later does he or she recognize that this is the monster’s final trick; the scars run deep, and the awareness of the truth grows like an infection. The Last One knows that the monster isn’t dead, only sent to the other side. There it waits until it can slip into the mundane world again. Perhaps next time it will be a knife-wielding madman, or a fanged beast, or some nameless tentacled thing. It’s the monster with a thousand faces. The details matter only to the next victims.”
― Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine

“We’re different from other people, she’d said. We only feel at home when we’re a little bit afraid.”
― Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine

“Everything beautiful hurts.”
― Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine

“The business travelers, however, were all business, from their business jacket to their business skirts and their skinny business shoes. They sliced through the crowd of civilians like business sharks”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“Look, you can't think of a person like it's one thing, one 'I' that decides everything. The brain is a collective, a huge number of all these thinking modules. It doesn't make a decision, it arrives at one.”
― Daryl Gregory, Afterparty

“If this is what it's like to be human, he thought, no wonder the world is so fucked up.”
― Daryl Gregory, The Devil's Alphabet

“He wondered what the collective noun was for psychologists: a shortage of shrinks? A confession of counsellors?”
― Daryl Gregory, We Are All Completely Fine

“I haven’t used my dick in so long I wouldn’t know where to find it. I sent it out for a pack of Camels in 1979 and it never came back.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“The best aunts aren't substitute parents, they're co-conspirators.”
― Daryl Gregory, Harrison Squared

“Stella had learned to do a passable impersonation of a normal person, but she couldn’t keep it up for long.”
― Daryl Gregory, Revelator

“The human egg is a Mrs. Bennet, desperate to marry off her daughters...It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sperm must be in want of a matching strand of DNA.”
― Daryl Gregory, Afterparty

“He lit the cigarette and inhaled gratefully.

"You want one?"

"No thanks. Had a touch of the cancer a few years ago."

"What kind?"

"Prostate."

"I'm not asking you to smoke it in your ass.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“What I remember are tentacles. Tentacles and teeth.”
― Daryl Gregory, Harrison Squared

“Divine essence?' I said. 'Hey, I'm Fat Boy, I'll possess a guy and make him eat ten pounds of chocolate in one sitting! Yeah, that's divine, that's fucking deep, that's like ...' I couldn't think what that was like. It was like something, though.”
― Daryl Gregory, Pandemonium

“Just curious? That's a bullshit phrase.”
“It's a simple question. How long—”
“No, it's a signal that bullshit is about to follow. It's the hat that bullshit puts on before it goes out to get the paper.”
― Daryl Gregory, Afterparty

“The question, then, was how long could a human being stay awake? Keith Richards could party for three days straight, but I wasn't sure if he counted as a human being.”
― Daryl Gregory, Pandemonium

“The thing about skeletons was, you never knew how much space they were taking up in the closet until you got rid of them.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“Then they were off again, across the unbroken sprawl of Chicagoland, a single city made up of interlocking strip malls, decorated at random intervals by WELCOME TO signs with defiantly rural names—River Forest, Forest Glen, Glenview—and enough dales and groves and elms and oaks to populate Middle Earth. The flatlanders had been especially determined to tag every bump of land with a “Heights” or “Ridge.” Pity the poor hobbit trying to find anything to climb in the town of Mount Prospect.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“The problem with getting old was that each day had to compete with the thousands of others gone by. How wonderful would a day have to be to win such a beauty contest?”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of paint into his face, and the shade was named Blinding Pain.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders

“The rabbit is already in the hat. Do not clap for fucking Tinkerbell. Believe nothing.”
― Daryl Gregory, Afterparty

“You know why I’m raising you kids to be Cubs fans?” Buddy shakes his head. “Any mook can be a fan of a winning team,” Dad says. “It takes character to root for the doomed. You show up, you watch your boys take their swings, and you watch ’em go down in flames—every damn day. You think Jack Brickhouse is an optimist? No-siree. He may sound happy, but he’s dying inside. There’s no seat in Wrigley Field for a God damn Pollyanna. You root-root-root for the home team, and they lose anyway. It teaches you how the world works, kid. Sure, start every spring with your hopes and dreams, but in the universe in which we live, you will be mathematically eliminated by Labor Day. Count on it.”
― Daryl Gregory, Spoonbenders