Simon Kurt Unsworth > Quotes

“Terrible and ancient and scarred with the endless cold of space, the terrible and ancient things glistened with frozen moisture and colors played across the surface of the skin, colors that were never meant to be seen on earth.”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, Lovecraft Unbound

“Because this is Hell, Thomas—have you understood nothing? We all do what it requires of us, no matter how pointless or trivial those things appear to be. We are, all of us, at the whim of forces and desires and urgencies far greater, far wider, than we can ever hope to recognize or understand. Hell knows what you will find in there, but it will not pass on that knowledge, because you need to find it for yourselves.”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, The Devil's Detective

“But joy is individual, and can only be experienced alone. Hell is communal, but Heaven is personal.”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, The Devil's Evidence

“There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he'd seen since this all started? He'd been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.

That was old. Every television station had those shots.

He'd been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man's civilized veneer was when set against nature's uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted - a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.

("Into The Water")”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, Best New Horror: Volume 25

“The hope of Elevation has to remain something random, impossible to see properly, given not to those who earn it but to those with no discernible right to it. Resentment, fear, loathing, and a tiny, flickering light of hope always just out of reach, that is Hell, yes?”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, The Devil's Detective

“...those occasional people who seem to achieve some kind of happiness here like your two dead colleagues, these are the things that Hell allows to flourish in tiny, stunted bursts, to make it immeasurably worse for everyone else.”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, The Devil's Detective

“Hell is not a place of no hope, Thomas, but a place where tiny amounts of hope are allowed to flourish.”
― Simon Kurt Unsworth, The Devil's Detective