Nathan Ballingrud > Quotes

“She’s like a thousand different people right now, all waiting to be, and every time she makes a choice, one of those people goes away forever. Until finally you run out of choices and you are whoever you are.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“A ghost is something that fills a hole inside you, where you lost something. It's a memory. Sometimes it can be painful, and sometimes it can be scary. Sometimes it's hard to tell where the ghost ends and real life begins.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“And then Carlos thought, You left me. You left me in the end. Why? He hugged his dog close, burying his nose in her fur. He knew there was no answer beyond the obvious, constant imbalance in any transaction of the heart. You don’t love me the way I love you.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“He had a theory that people warped as they aged, like old records left out in the sun, and unless you did it together and warped in conformity to each other, you eventually became incapable of aligning with anybody else.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“He imagined the room bathed in blood, himself striding through it, a raven amongst the carcasses. Strutting like any carrion king.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He tells us that occasionally there are men and women who wander through Hell in thin processions, wearing heavy gray robes and bearing lanterns to light their way. They are invariably chained together and led through the burning canyons by a loping demon: some malformed, tooth-spangled pinwheel of limbs and claws. They tour safely because they are shuttered against the sights and sounds of Hell by the iron boxes around their heads, which give them the appearance of strange astronauts on a pilgrimage through fire.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“She learned that there was an animal living inside her, something that celebrated when nature did its work upon the weak. She came to value that animal.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Maw

“Silence blew from the hole she had dug like smoke. She could feel what lay just beyond. The new countryside. The unspeaking multitude. Steeples and arches of bone; temples of silence. She felt the great shapes that moved there, majestic and unfurled, utterly silent, utterly dark.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror 2008: Twenty-First Annual Collection

“Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Something big was trapped inside him, some great sadness, and he felt if he could cry, or even articulate it in speech, it would relieve the pressure and provide him some measure of relief. But he couldn't reach it. He couldn't find a way to address it. He wondered if it would become the thing that defined him.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Visible Filth

“He wished to be home in London, with its dark libraries and lantern-lit alleys, with his pipe and his brandy, surrounded by the Society’s flickering candles and devil-haunted shadows. There he would feel safe. Out here, in this briny, sun-wracked environment, he felt exposed and bewildered. A moth lost in a delirium of light.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“I didn't use to be this way. I was happy when I was a child. I had such grand ideas about how life would be. What happened to me? What happened to us?"
"We grew up.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Crypt of the Moon Spider

“Life so far seemed like a kind of dance to him, and he was pleased to discover that he was pretty good at it. Lf there was something hollow underneath it all, a well of fear that sometimes seemed to pull everything else into it and leave him clutching the stone rim for fear of falling into himself, well, that was part of being human, he supposed. That's what the booze was for.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Visible Filth

“And yet, they caught glimpses of things on the shore that could have had no other provenance. A pinwheel of arms and hands, connecting in a knot of tissue bearing one staring blue eye, kept pace with them for hours, leaping in what appeared to be play, sometimes disappearing behind rocks for a mile or more, only to be spotted again as the landscape evened out; a small shack at the base of the cliff, with three charred black figures, paused in their construction of a wooden pyre to fix them with a red glare as they sailed past, while something small and frightened bucked beneath the”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“She didn’t want to hear his story. Everybody had one. Tragedy gets boring after a while.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Maw

“All my life I’ve wanted to write adventure stories, but I’ve always been more suited to reading than to writing. I never believed my imagination was up to the task.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange

“They were surrounded by threat, by coiled violence, and by the possibility of extravagant fortune. He felt as though he rode on the crest of a towering wave. He felt like a usurper, like a new and terrible king.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“Everywhere we go, we lay waste. We take and take and take, and leave nothing behind us.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange

“The Martian Chronicles meets True Grit,”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange

“When she looked at him again she had raised windows for eyes, with curtains blowing out of them, framing a yellow-lit room. Below them, her face declined in wet shingles, flowing with little rivulets of rainwater.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“Jeremy supposed that a Christmas party full of elementary school professionals might be the worst place in the world. He would drift among them helplessly, like a grizzly bear in a roomful of children, expected not to eat anyone.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“He used to feel smaller than them, less significant, as if he’d been born without some essential gene to make him acceptable to other people.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters

“You might as well be sorry for the sun going down. It’s just what happens.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Strange

“Balance eases the heart.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015

“Maggie always did appreciate a bit of symmetry.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Crypt of the Moon Spider

“The roaches were in high spirits. There were half a dozen of them, caught in the teeth of love. They capered across the liquor bottles, perched atop pour spouts like wooden ladies on the prows of sailing ships. They lifted their wings and delicately fluttered. They swung their antennae with a ripe sexual urgency, tracing love sonnets in the air.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, The Visible Filth

“Carlos had never married; he'd become so acclimated to his loneliness that eventually the very idea of human companionship just made him antsy and tired. It was not as though he'd had to fight for his independence; his demeanor had grown cold and mean as he aged, not from any ill feeling toward other people, but simply from an unwillingness to endure their eccentricities. He had a theory that people warped as they aged, like old records left out in the sun, and unless you did it together and warped in conformity to each other, you eventually became incapable of aligning with anybody else.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“He’d been raised in violence, and to Charlie it functioned as a kind of language, one through which he could communicate the purest expressions of his heart.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Crypt of the Moon Spider

“Memories you thought were yours are sometimes fabrications, constructed to protect you from the truth. Discovering what’s real is often a traumatic experience.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Crypt of the Moon Spider

“Four days ago: he'd stood on the front porch of his home in the deep blue hollow of early morning, watching the waters of the Gulf roll onto the beach. It was his favorite time of day: that sweet, lonesome hinge between darkness and daylight, when he could pretend he was alone in the world and free to take it on his own terms.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, North American Lake Monsters