Brian Catling > Quotes

“The quietness here had an agreement with dust; neither settled.”
― Brian Catling

“One solitary tear crept through the scars of his face, through the diagrams of constellations and the incised maps of influence and dominion. A liquid without a name, it being made of so many emotions and conflicts, each cancelling the other out until only salt and gravity filled the moment and moved down through his expression.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“white men always told you where they were. They sent out a bow wave, so that the earth and its animals would murmur, well in advance of their arrival. Their wake was immense. Crushed and contaminated, the land was forced to repair itself, even after the gentlest of their journeys.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“For so it is among those who shed lives every few years: they keep their deflated interior causeways, hold them running parallel with their current useable ones; ghost arteries, sleeping shrunken next to those that pump life. Hushed lymphatics, like quiet ivy alongside the speeding juice of now. Nerve trees like bone coral, hugging the whisper of bellowing communications.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“I spend my time living close to the animals. I think they have more to teach alive.”
― Brian Catling, The Cloven

“He had killed the Bowman Peter Williams, and years later had been tricked into eating his shrivelled head, which seated its longing deep in his marrow and its waking in the empty ventricles of the monster’s leather soul. Now it was waking up.”
― Brian Catling, The Cloven

“No, it was something else, something with human tendencies, which, of course, made it terrible in a different way.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“She became aware years later that he had that rarest of gifts: engagement. Whatever he became interested in absorbed him totally during the time of his commitment to it. It was that strangeness that made him close to children. He could talk to them with ease and share the wonder of their understanding.”
― Brian Catling, The Cloven

“Walking into the night, he was in control of his world. He would shape it with the gods and demons into an understanding of forces, each with its own price, marked in blood.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“He knew the hollow longing and guilt were growing stronger and that there was no money or memory to hold on to. There were no facts to grip and the fictions were worn out. He then realised it was time to die, and he did.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“The ship ploughed through the darkness, a pinpoint of light skimming the great curve of water. A million beasts rolled, fled and laughed in the vast distance beneath it, while the stars multiplied and roared in the perpetual silence above.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“Why anyone would find cause to shoot at me remains a mystery. My dealings with other humans are decades past, and all before that is erased. Only my wife keeps the memories in her flesh and moisture, both of which live in my bow.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“He sat by the fast water, enjoying its speed, its splendid indifference, and its rippling sound, silently observing and wading birds with their shrill curl of beak and voice. He drank deeply of life so that he knew the taste of it here, knew the vibrant wealth of its dominion, knew exactly what he was taking from the man who would die on this ground.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“They had witnessed the flowing winds of the Vorrh, long, singing currents of turbulence that flew and rippled between the contoured ground and the vast canopy of still leaves. Its profound, limited hurricane was still in their lungs, the cleanest air ever breathed; sharp as lime, soft as new snow.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“A new root had grown and in its winding search it had gripped a part of life that she had never experienced before. Her love for the child was overwhelming and gave her a new depth of purpose; the world now grasped her in a more substantial fashion. Held fast to its shifting and the rolling lurch of its futures.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile

“The vibration passed through them, through the turning ball of life, through the furniture and the floors, and all the way down to the well, where its harmony increased and spun, igniting tiny engines that ignited tiny engines that ignited tiny engines.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“Writing is the shame of man. It dilutes the guts of meaning. If thou be not man enough to hold great learning and the saying of events in your memory, then thou should not attempt to keep them imprisoned. The world was turned by scrolls and books. The making of those bricks of paper even contaminated the tower of language itself, making it less than a woodpile or an old maid’s collection of rags. Words are power, and writing is only a pissed shadow.”
― Brian Catling, Hollow

“Just for a moment, he heard a distant flock of birds sing from her dripping and distorted mouth.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“The pain was unbearable. She wanted to cry or scream, but the crawling hollow ache had plugged and sandpapered away all her expressions of self. Those indulgences had been banished forever. Suicide had always been a fiction. A thought that had only ever been a quote in her head. Something for the underclasses, those weak in mind or purpose. Poor people and cowards. Now it sat on her heart like a warm toad. Cherishing the place as a natural habitat.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile

“His death had been the intruder that day and it had taken the only thing he really valued. It has pissed on his hopes and marked its territory inside his life. He hoped it would come back through the slit and take him now, struggle with him while he hacked at its merciless velocity.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile

“He had said these sentences so many times before that the words seemed to have lost their vitality and meaning, in the way that over-washed patterns of colour maintain only a pale impression of what they must have been,”
― Brian Catling, Hollow

“She went to the window and walked out into the glittering night. The city was already sleeping and the heavens took up the sound of the creatures below, the stars making a notation of their trills and bells, which rang in the darkness like glass. Whispers of Satie joined them from the room, and there seemed, in this inimitable moment, to be an agreement between time and the proximity of all things, as if clumsy humans might have a place in all this infinite, perfect darkness, if only they played at the edge. Out of sight, blindfolded, and in agreement.”
― Brian Catling, The Vorrh

“It is not hidden it is unseen. You can feel the influence of the wind without seeing it.”
― Brian Catling, Hollow