Laird Barron > Quotes

“Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.”
― Laird Barron

“The cold impassive stars didn't bother him so much as the gaps between them did.”
― Laird Barron, The Croning

“It’s about walking, or crawling as the case may be, through this messy existence with eyes open. It’s about squeezing a fistful of shit and praying for a diamond.”
― Laird Barron

“Curiosity did not kill the cat all by itself.”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“I used to write as an escape. There’s no escape. There’s just me sending my voice into the dark, waiting for an echo." – Laird Barron”
― Laird Barron

“Everyone is looking for the answer. They do not want to find the answer, trust me. Unfortunately, the answer will find them. Life—it’s like one of those unpleasant nature documentaries. To be the cameraman instead of the subjects, eh?”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart.”
― Laird Barron, The Croning

“Enlightenment isn't necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“For they were the stuff of nightmares; maggoty abominations possessed of incalculable and vile intellect that donned flesh and spines of men and beasts to shield themselves from the sun and enable themselves to walk upright instead of merely slithering.”
― Laird Barron, The Croning

“When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time - at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I'm the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I broke the mold under my heel.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“The universe dilated within him, above him. Something like joy stirred in Lancaster’s being, a sublime ecstasy born of terror. His heart felt as if it might burst, might leap from his chest. His cheeks were wet. Drops of blood glittered on his bare arms, the backs of his hands, his thighs, his feet. Black as the blackest pearls come undone from a string, the droplets lifted from him, drifted from him like a slow motion comet tail, and floated toward the road, the fields. For the first time in an age he heard nothing but the night sounds of crickets, his own breath. His skull was quiet.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“Ye wanna steer clear o' 'im and 'is little friends. Ye shall come to a nasty end nosin' 'bout that gent."

The Spy knew the refrain. He wondered aloud as to the nature of these little friends.

"Ain't ever seen 'em, just 'eard of 'em. Cripples and deformed ones. Some ain't got no arms or legs is what I 'ear. they crawl along behind 'im, see? Wrigglin' in the dirt all ruddy worm-like."

"He's got an entourage of folk without arms," the Spy said, raising his brows toward the brim of his cocked hat. "Or legs. Following him wherever he goes."

"Some got arms, some don't. Some got legs, some don't. Some got neither. That's what I 'ear." The farmer shrugged, made the sign of warding again, and would say no more on the matter.”
― Laird Barron, The Croning

“If the sky, by sinister alchemy, or diabolical prestidigitation, transformed into a mirror of the mother sea, the primordial cradle; and if leviathans swam that breadth and hovered, softly undulating over the teaming habitations of the globe, feasting; what should you wear?”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“That really your kind of crowd? These effete psychos who want to relive the seedier aspects of the Roman empire?

These are the kind of folks who own tropical islands. Hell, some of them run banana republics for fun. They want a spectacle, I can fill the bill.

Ah yes. Dictators, inbred nobility and other megalomaniacs. Swell friends you got there.

It's a living.”
― Laird Barron, The Light is the Darkness

“Neither light nor heat could withstand it; to gaze into that nullity and to comprehend its scope was to have one’s humanity snuffed. Only the inhuman thrived in out there in deep black.”
― Laird Barron, The Croning

“Mac, are we having an adventure? Is someone going to shoot at me? Am I going to be kidnapped again? Locked in a trunk and dropped into the sea? Experimented on with growth hormones? Chased by a lunatic in a mechanical werewolf getup? It sure feels like we’re having an adventure.”
“Yep, we’re having an adventure,” Mac said.”
― Laird Barron, X's For Eyes

“He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art—the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few”
― Laird Barron

“Money was a problem. Money was always a problem no matter how many bones he crushed or how much blood he let or dues he paid. The fucking rent was always due.”
― Laird Barron, The Light is the Darkness

“I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair.”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“Robert Service once said dying is easy, it’s the keeping on living that’s hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All

“...he was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered.”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“—Only fools and the dead never change their mind.”
― Laird Barron, Occultation and Other Stories

“Your father had other plans for you. Alas, his breakdown and untimely demise derailed everything he'd worked to accomplish. He would not approve of your quixotic pursuit of Imogene. She became embroiled in his vendetta with the forces of darkness, as it were. No sense following her into oblivion."

Conrad said, "You talk a lot for a guy on oxygen.”
― Laird Barron, The Light is the Darkness

“A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean.”
― Laird Barron, The Imago Sequence

“Conrad might be on his way to achieving godhead and wouldn't that be a kick in the ass?”
― Laird Barron, The Light is the Darkness

“I am abroad in the night with my servants. We come to smoke the northern lights, to rape the Wendigo, to melt igloos with streams of hot, bloody piss. To see and see.”
“Oh. You’re a bit east.”
― Laird Barron, X's For Eyes

“Actually, coyotes are much scarier than wolves. Sneaky, sneaky little suckers. Eat you up. Lick the blood all up.”
― Laird Barron, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All