B. Catling > Quotes

“All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“Complexity has crippled me before, and the healing from it took too many years.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“The Frenchman had never had any feelings of masculine protection for the fairer sex, even the few he had tolerated and liked. He and his paid companion had been locked in a crude democracy forged from selfishness, desire, and humiliation.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“The young have left for the cities and for slave labour abroad. They are underground, digging fossils for other people’s heat. They are in venomous sheds, weaving chemical cancer. They are automata in chains of industry that do not need identity, language, or families. All their saved money is endlessly counted as escape.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“He knew the hollow longing and guilt were growing stronger and that there was no money or memory to hold on to. There were no facts to grip and the fictions were worn out. He then realised it was time to die, and he did.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“During the night, lightning can be seen far out at sea. Above the horizon, soundless dendrites of storm flicker, marbling the curve of the earth on their way towards here and the waiting dawn.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“The ancient black hand shone in the flickering light of the small campfire, its tattoos of spirals and sun wheels spinning as it passed through the circular clearing of the forest. It moved past the two men sitting close to the flames and whispered in the dancing shadows, stroking the cheek of its grandson before vanishing out of the circle and into the night.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“He knew that he had invented everything in their lives. Maybe in the world. Sometimes he thought he had dreamt reality itself. Dreamt it outside of sleep, which now eluded him continually.”
― B. Catling, The Vorrh

“After they departed the river, the beach, and the raised lip of land, it all readjusted under the towering awareness of the trees. The pebbles lost the stain of human warmth. The water shook off its taste of sweat and the flattened grasses slowly clicked back into their vertical semblance of the rest of the forest. The breeze cleared the air and the birds changed their tune of alarm and disgust into a softer conversation about being here, there, and now. The ants and the clustering insects stopped waiting for the bodies to be still and foraged elsewhere, and the omnipresent mosquitoes reassessed their menu. In one hour all traces of the intrusion were lost and decent time settled back, oblivious to the rubbed-out moment of blight.”
― B. Catling