Brian Hodge > Quotes

“Without wonder, there’s no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don’t exercise your capacity for wonder…well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that’s starting to atrophy and die.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“Nothing can play havoc with your sense of scale better than looking deeply into the night skies. It can leave you feeling immense and privileged one minute, minuscule and insignificant the next.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“Let me see what I can come up with,' she said, and seemed to take a new satisfaction in it now. Something wrong to do, a law to break, and if she was lucky she might even get to steal, and it must have been then that everything changed between us and each of us didn't just have a neighbor to pass the time with but the closest thing either of us could find to a friend. ("Just Outside Our Windows, Deep Inside Our Walls")”
― Brian Hodge, Best New Horror 22

“Some dreams never leave you, because they’re more than just dreams. They’re truth, distilled to purest potency.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“Sometimes we sleep because we want to, sometimes because we need it, and sometimes we sleep in self-defense.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“uncharacteristic sorrow he showed one evening as he contemplated the stars and confessed, “I really thought we’d be out there by now. I really did. But we’ve become a complacent species without will.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“He wanted to call it madness, but knew better. If this was madness, it wasn’t his, nor even Cecil’s. It was a madness that had anchored itself into the world, hiding in plain sight, and he was only now waking up to it.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“Then someday, in a million years, or a billion, or so far from now there's not even a number for it... in this version of the universe, or in the next one to come, or another one after that... these particles that used to be you... they'll end up together again. Against trillions-to-one odds, they'll find each other again. They probably won't look like you anymore. They'll be stirred into something totally different. But down deep inside, something in them will recognize each other and will connect back to before, to now, and they'll have memories of what they used to be together. They'll remember being you. Part of them will want to be you again... and whatever it is they've become, that's going to make that living being think it's crazy.”
― Brian Hodge, The Immaculate Void

“A new truth doesn’t win out by convincing its opponents it’s right. They’re too entrenched, even when it’s obvious how wrong they are. The truth just has to outlive them, wait for them to clear out of the way, until what’s left are the people who grow up familiar with it.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“So, not at first, but I eventually realized I was seeing this level of reality that’s going on right over our heads and most people have no idea it’s even there. I realized I was seeing the night sky as our ancestors did, and that by losing it, we’d lost our everyday touch with our place in the cosmos.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“Of all the things I’d imagined in nightmares and dreams of dead things, the woman who gripped my leg was the worst and my last.”
― Brian Hodge, A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

“A bubble between dimensions. A wormhole to a space without time, where something vast sat and waited, in a lair where a billion years felt no different than a day. Maybe it had crawled there eons ago. Maybe the planet had amalgamated around it.”
― Brian Hodge, The Immaculate Void

“Sometimes it seems as if the best technology is still only catching up to what nature has already figured out.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“Without wonder, there's no progress. Nothing gets done, nobody goes anywhere. If you don't exercise your capacity for wonder... well, use it or lose it. A civilization without wonder is a civilization that's starting to atrophy and die.”
― Brian Hodge, Whom the Gods Would Destroy

“Of hope and optimism I have none … because instead I have experience. I know the reception I’ll meet with.”
― Brian Hodge, Falling Idols

“Things beneath the earth could always endure time better than those above it.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“Enkidu never should’ve killed the guardian of the forest. He should’ve joined him. That’s what too much civilizing does to you.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“It’s got you thinking — you’ve never really known anyone who’s died of natural causes, have you? Parents and grandparents, plus friends and neighbors and casual lovers, they’ve all left you too early, and in such ghastly ways. Cancers and violence, accidents and congenital defects, aneurysms of the brain and psyche. You’ve heard of people who’ve slipped peacefully away in their sleep, or in their favorite easy chairs, after ripe octogenarian lives, but suspect they must be mythical, in the company of unicorns and mermaids. If you didn’t know better, you’d think there was a deliberate methodology behind it all, a gradual pattern of calamity spiraling inward until, at last, you’re the only one left to be dealt with. You could be expected to think that, but don’t, because you still keep your wits about you, thank god— So to speak.”
― Brian Hodge, Falling Idols

“He knew why the birds chose not to fly away, lingering until it was no longer an option. Did they see themselves flying as high as eagles? Everything needed a dream of itself as greater than it was.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“The oaks were a mellow orange, the maples a blazing red, the birches a creamy yellow, and then ippy air between them was suffused with the golden light of late afternoon. It bit gently, with a promise of winter and the icy teeth to come.”
― Brian Hodge, The Immaculate Void

“For the first time she realized she'd spent so much time mourning a world that had ended ages ago, hoping to resurrect it, that she'd never paid attention to what it was becoming. Or returning to again, now that it was unfettered. Where were the centaurs, she might have asked instead. Where were the gorgons, the furies, the giants and the gods?”
― Brian Hodge, The Weight of the Dead

“On the page in the book in the cabin on the mountain was a picture of an ant with what appeared to be a twig caught on its head, a twig tipped with a prickly looking bulb. But on the scale of ants, even what resembled a twig would be tiny. So the man looked, but did not see. He was supposed to know so much more about everything by now.
“What am I looking at here?”
The boy was patient with him, his slowness to comprehend. “That stick-looking thing? That’s a fungus growing into the ant’s head. Basically, it uses the ant as its legs to get around so it can do what needs doing.”
The man stared at the ant, trying to divine anything he could from its little button eyes. At first he felt sympathy for it, then realized no, what he felt was kinship. The ant was lucky. He was lucky. Briefly, he wondered if his thoughts were really his own.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“Timothy supposed this was what you got when you crossed youthful idealism with anger and a sense of futility. And weed.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“The Church,” he said in a slow hush, “is built on a solid foundation of miracles from the past. But it’s my belief—and I’m not alone in this—that the past is where they should stay. What’s in the past remains fixed and constant. There’s no reason to doubt it, no need to demand from it any greater explanation. There’s no need to question it. Only to believe in it. There it is and there it remains for all time, and it need never, ever, change…because it’s safely protected by time.”
― Brian Hodge, Worlds of Hurt

“Like with the relics. Never mind all the saints’ bones that actually came from animals—the Vatican won’t even keep its own records sensible. What are they up to now, more than a hundred and fifty nails from the crucifixion? Used that many, why, they’d still be taking him down off the cross to this day. What else…? Ah—nine breasts of Saint Eulalia. Twenty-eight fingers and thumbs of Saint Dominic. Ten heads of John the Baptist. Ten! You show me where in the Gospels it says anything about John the Baptist being a fucking Hydra,”
― Brian Hodge, Worlds of Hurt

“There's no love waiting for you. There's something massive, and powerful, you can feel it . . . but I still don't know how to accurately describe how you feel it, because it's more than just knowledge. It would be physical, too, if you had a body, except you don't. Or maybe it's a different kind of body, or maybe you just haven't yet shaken off the memory of the one you had, so it feels like you're still subject to the same expectations of gravity and pain.

Even though there's no love, you are wanted there. The main thing you're aware of is this pervading sense of greed. You're like one gold coin in a vault full of them, spilling over with them. You're there to be hoarded. I don't know why, I couldn't tell you why. Maybe it only wants you because it can have you. Or maybe it'll have some other use for you eventually, and for now you're in some kind of holding pen. But . . . the sense of claustrophobia, and betrayal . . . they're just devastating. You can feel that all around you, too . . . like a scream that got so loud you can't even hear it anymore, it just rips through you like an electric current . . .

And the only reason you know it's not Hell, or that maybe Heaven and Hell are the same thing, is because you can hear the singing, for lack of a better word, because it's not songs, or structured. But it's beautiful. Sure—it's Heaven, right? It seems to come from all around you, but it's far away at the same time. Maybe it won't be so bad, you're thinking, if I get to listen to this. But pretty soon, you realize it's not for you. And a little while after that, you start to notice the strain in it. Like that tone in a hostage's voice when he's reading a statement about how well his captors are treating him, except he's reading it with a gun at his head. And then you realize the worst thing of all: What you're hearing are the ones that have learned to beg . . .”
― Brian Hodge, World of Hurt

“Too many people around here, they’ve lost themselves inside a lifetime of Dominion theology. They may not know the term, but they’ve got the principles down cold. Go back some generations, our ancestors had it right. They saw themselves as stewards of the earth. Now it’s all about how God gave them dominion over everything, so they’ve got every right to do whatever they want with it.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky

“The horrors would follow, their paths laid down in the light of a younger sun.”
― Brian Hodge, Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles

“Say what you will of the Romans, they were no incompetents when it came to killing. They knew better than to nail some poor bugger up by his palms; the bones are too small.”
― Brian Hodge, Worlds of Hurt

“They were common law wed, no preachers involved. You can guess how that set with the more churchy types. Which was probably most of them. Still is. They pick and choose what suits them. ‘A man shall not lay with another man,’ they’re good about latching on to parts like that. But ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged,’ that goes in one ear and out the other.”
― Brian Hodge, I'll Bring You the Birds from Out of the Sky