Erica Waters > Quotes

“There will always be men in the world who want to control and hurt and kill us. Men who drug us and drive us off roads and hit us with their fists. Men who take girls and make them their toys. Men who gain pleasure from our pain. […] They will walk through this world until it comes unraveled. They will keep on doing what they’ve been doing for thousands and thousands of years until the earth has had enough and ends us all. […] But today I refuse to fear them, not a single one. They have strength and cruelty and endless complicity. They walk tall and almost always win. But not here, not on the Bend, where owls that were once girls fly free. Not here, where magic rides up to meet my will. […] Here, we are witches and men are nothing. Here, the river has teeth.”
― Erica Waters, The River Has Teeth

“I scream until I am no longer a girl, no longer flesh and blood, but only sound and terror hurtling through the night.”
― Erica Waters, Ghost Wood Song

“Bluegrass lyrics are almost always about death, loss, and unrequited love, but the music – the noise we make with out banjos and our fiddles – is joyful. The dead are always with us, even after their ghosts move on, but it's the life pulsing through our veins that makes the music.”
― Erica Waters, Ghost Wood Song

“Grief is what binds the living and the dead. He couldn't have taught me to play this fiddle even if he'd wanted to. Only his death could teach me.”
― Erica Waters, Ghost Wood Song

“Today, surviving lightning doesn't feel like enough.”
― Erica Waters, Ghost Wood Song

“Some people love until it hurts, until it’s more pain than anything else.”
― Erica Waters, Ghost Wood Song

“I'm as restless as the ghosts today.”
― Erica Waters, Ghost Wood Song

“We are like a mockery to the dead-so young and so alive, our blood beating hot and excited in our veins. If the roles were reversed and it were me who lay beneath the earth, beneath this thoughtless revelry, I would want to grab hold of the revelers; pull them by the ankles; such the breath from their mouths, the blood from their veins; steal their young bodies, young heart, young dreams for myself”
― Erica Waters, All That Consumes Us

“But then I realize the person you choose to love isn't the one who shows up when you ask them to. It's the person who shows up even when you don't.”
― Erica Waters, Ghost Wood Song

“It seemed to me that a soul that preferred a cold grave to the white light of Heaven was suspect.”
― Erica Waters, The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror

“But, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go and give it a try.”
― Erica Waters, The Restless Dark: A Haunting YA Thriller―A True Crime Podcast Mystery of Survival and Revenge

“We're about to see exactly what kind of witch Natasha Greymont is.”
― Erica Waters, The River Has Teeth

“I am death, I am vengeance, I am the river rising up to swallow the world.”
― Erica Waters, The River Has Teeth

“Bones cannot pretend, cannot hide from themselves. They can't overthink or be afraid. They just are.”
― Erica Waters, The Restless Dark: A Haunting YA Thriller―A True Crime Podcast Mystery of Survival and Revenge

“There is no such thing as generational curses, no evil carried in our DNA. That's just Pentecostal bullshit, a way to reject responsibility and guilt. We are the choices we make, the actions we commit. We decide for ourselves whether we are good or bad. This is real life, not a fucking Greek Tragedy.”
― Erica Waters, The Restless Dark: A Haunting YA Thriller―A True Crime Podcast Mystery of Survival and Revenge

“Dad said I should be afraid of death because I'll finally have to face judgement for my sins. But he was wrong. These bones tell me there's nothing in death to fear. It's only the living who need to be afraid.”
― Erica Waters, The Restless Dark: A Haunting YA Thriller―A True Crime Podcast Mystery of Survival and Revenge

“Seemed like it was always the greed of men that undid a successful woman.”
― Erica Waters, The River Has Teeth

“Here, the river has teeth.”
― Erica Waters, The River Has Teeth

“The dead are starting to get restless. I can feel them, just under my skin’s like one of Granny’s phantom worms.”
― Erica Waters, The Gathering Dark: An Anthology of Folk Horror