Lucius Shepard > Quotes

“When the tragedies of others become for us diversions, sad stories with which to enthrall our friends, interesting bits of data to toss out at cocktail parties, a means of presenting a pose of political concern, or whatever…when this happens we commit the gravest of sins, condemn ourselves to ignominy, and consign the world to a dangerous course. We begin to justify our casual overview of pain and suffering by portraying ourselves as do-gooders incapacitated by the inexorable forces of poverty, famine, and war. “What can I do?” we say, “I’m only one person, and these things are beyond my control. I care about the world’s trouble, but there are no solutions.” Yet no matter how accurate this assessment, most of us are relying on it to be true, using it to mask our indulgence, our deep-seated lack of concern, our pathological self-involvement.”
― Lucius Shepard, The Best of Lucius Shepard

“The effort mined a core of dizziness inside him. He resisted it, but then realizing that there was nothing attractive about consciousness, nothing he cared to know about the someone in charge of death and butterflies, he let himself go spiraling down past layers of darkness and shining wings, darkness and mystical light, and a memory of pain so bright that it became a white darkness wherein he lost all track of being.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Even the serenity he felt was something that needed to be understood; it seemed a symptom of a deeper and more complete understanding that lay yet beyond him.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Don’t you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we’re talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work’s formal imperative.’ ‘I’m outta film,’ said the mestizo cameraman.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“...from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in between.”
― Lucius Shepard

“she had condemned herself by engaging in a kind of method living, chirping a litany of affirmation. “I think I can, I think I can,” playing The Little Adultress That Could, and thus losing the hope of her heart, the strength of her soul.”
― Lucius Shepard, The Ends Of The Earth

“Everything, she realized, even the happiest of occurrences, might be a cause for tears if you failed to see it in terms of the world that you inhabited”
― Lucius Shepard, The Dragon Griaule

“Then how come you went there?"
"I was lonesome. Lonesome takes what it can get.”
― Lucius Shepard

“There was no certainty, no secure path, no absolutely moral one. You did the best you could for yourself and those you cared about, and hoped that this would be a sufficiently broad spectrum of concern to keep your soul in healthy condition.”
― Lucius Shepard, The Dragon Griaule

“His thoughts came and went one at a time, without logical attachments or chains of causation, like hawks circling an empty sky. [...] And from their isolation, their profound disunity, he concluded that a mind was not something grown or evolved, but was a mosaic, a jackdaw’s nest of baubles and bits of glass between which lightning flickered now and again, connecting and establishing the whole for fractions of seconds, creating the illusion of a man, of a man’s rational and emotional convictions. Years before, months before, he might have denied this conception, put forward a romantic conception in its stead. But the constituency of his mind, his jackdaw’s nest, had changed, with war and prostitutes replacing home-cooking and girlfriends, and though a younger Mingolla would have rejected the bleakness of this self-knowledge, the current one found in it a source of strength, a justification for conscienceless action, for contempt of sentiment.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“Jerry’s pudgy, built along the lines of Papa Smurf, with a tanning-machine tan like brownish orange paint and a ridiculous toupee—he cultivates this clownish image to distract from his nasty disposition.”
― Lucius Shepard, Five Autobiographies and a Fiction