Andrew Pyper > Quotes

“Sometimes people close a door because they’re trying to figure out a way to get you to knock.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Your melancholy. Or depression. Along with nine-tenths of the afflictions I’ve studied, diagnosed, attempted to treat. Call them whatever you like, but they’re just different names for loneliness. That’s what lets the darkness in. That’s what you have to fight.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Sometimes, monsters are real,” Tess said, rolling over, leaving me alone with the ladybug staring up at me. “Even if they don’t look like monsters.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Missing someone feels like hunger. An insatiable emptiness right at the core of yourself.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist: A Novel

“Tell me this. What is it with men and feeling like they have to act like self-destructive superheroes whenever trouble shows up?”
“It’s the only way we know how to love.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Darkness isn't the matter from which the Antichrist was formed, but intelligence. Foreknowledge.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“We need to talk." she says.
"The four most dreaded words in the history of marriage.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“I've seen the photos," he said.
"Photos are never the same as the real thing," I said.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“There are things in this world most of us never see,” I find myself saying. “We’ve trained ourselves not to see them, or try to pretend we didn’t if we do. But there’s a reason why, no matter how sophisticated or primitive, every religion has demons.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“It's strange. Hearing you say my name."
"I can say it again if you'd like."
"No, I'll remember just fine.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Guardians

“Cancer is a kind of possession, too. And like a demon, before it claims you, it nibbles away at who you are, erases the face you have always presented to the world to show the unwanted thing inside.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“And this is the only really startling thing about the evil of the world: not that so much of it exists, but that nobody ever really expects it.”
― Andrew Pyper, Lost Girls

“I’ve never been able to figure out what you’re so scared of, but there’s something in you that’s got you backed into a corner so tight your eyes are closed against it,” she says. “You don’t have to tell me what it is. I bet you don’t even know yourself. But here’s the thing: I probably won’t be around for you when you face it down. I wish I could be, but I won’t. You’re going to need someone. You won’t make it if you’re alone. I don’t know of anyone who could.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Grief has a colour. It has other characteristics, I know now, collectively forming a personality of sorts. An antagonizing figure that arrives in your life and refuses to leave or sit anywhere but next to you or stop whispering the name of the departed in your ear.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“There’s no reality but versions of reality.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“I am well and truly messed up.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Last night I had the dream again. Except it's not a dream I know because when it comes for me, I'm still awake.
There's my desk. The map on the wall. The Stuffed animals I don't play with anymore but don't want to hurt Dad's feelings by sticking in the closet I might be in bed. I might be just standing there, looking foe a missing sock. Then i'm gone.
it doesn't just show me somthing this time, it takes me from here to THERE> standing on the bank of a river of fire. A thousand wasps in my head. Fighting and dying inside my skull, their bodies piling up against the backs of me eyes. Stinging and stinging.
Dad's voice. Somewhere across the river. Calling my name. I've never heard him sound like that before. He's so frightened he can't hide it, even though he tries (he ALWAYS tries).
The dead boy floats by.
Facedown. So I wait for his head to pop up, show the holes where his eye used to be, say somthing with his blue lips. One of the terrible things it might make him do. But he just passes like a chunk of wood. I've never been here before, but I know it's real. The river is the line between this place and the Other Place. And I'm on the wrong side. There's a dark forest behind me but that's not what it is. I try to get to where Dad is. My toes touch the river and it sings with pain. Then there's arms pulling me back. Dragging me into the trees. They feel like a man's arms but it's not a man that sticks its fingers into my mouth. Nails that scratch the back of my throat. Skin that tastes like dirt. But just before that, before I'm back in my room with my missing sock in my hand, I realize I've been calling out to Dad just like he's been calling out to me. Telling him the same thing the whole time. Not words from my mouth through the air, but from my heart through the earth, so only the two of us could hear it.
FIND ME”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Fuck you. You think this is a scene in some indie drama you take my wife to in the Village, some pack of lies the guy at the Times said was so naturalistically performed. But in real life? We’re bad actors. We’re slobs who actually hurt. You don’t feel it, you couldn’t, but the pain you’re causing us—causing my family—it’s destroying our lives, what we have together. What we had.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“All my life I have been pursued by the black dogs of unaccountable gloom”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“The dead boy floats by.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“And what do we have? A profound if sexless intimacy of a kind I’ve never known with either man or woman since childhood, and perhaps not even then.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“If it ain’t broke, don’t let some stupid fucker fuck it up sort of thing.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“What's the problem? In a nutshell?"

"I'm a medical specialist. We don't really do nutshells[.]”
― Andrew Pyper, The Damned

“Though it's with you at every moment, it's always something of a surprise to discover that you can be at once alive and alone.”
― Andrew Pyper, Lost Girls

“Don't stop to understand. You may never understand. Just keep going.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Don’t be crude, Professor. Profanity is one contest you will not win with me.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Demonologist

“Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? . . . Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain. —Bram Stoker, Dracula”
― Andrew Pyper, The Only Child

“Some call it prayer. And as with all prayers, it comes down to either asking someone else to fight for you, or asking yourself to fight.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Damned

“How do I shoot?” “Your finger through there. Feel that? But you only pull if you’re sure that everything’s right.” “Why?” “Because you can’t take it back.” She”
― Andrew Pyper, The Only Child

“But they are only the faces of the dead. Coming into detail as we hurtle toward them. They see us, too. Fingers scratching at the ice’s rough underside, desperate to be the first to pull us down.”
― Andrew Pyper, The Damned