Caitlín R. Kiernan > Quotes

“Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.”
― Caitlin R. Kiernan

“Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“No one ever said you have to be dead and buried to be a ghost.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“You love someone. You don’t leave her to drown. And you don’t tell her she’s crazier than she already knows that she is!”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over.
"Houses Under The Sea”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan

“You know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, Daughter of Hounds

“Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.”
― Caitlin R. Kiernan

“And it means snapshots, because that's what all stories I write come down to; each is a snapshot of who I was during however many days and weeks it was written. A fictional reflection of my mind fossilized, set in paper and ink, instead of stone. Memorialized, for better or worse. This is who I was, and this, and this, and this, and that, and most times I look back and wince. I'm rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, I'm even grateful to the me of then who left a snapshot for the me of now. Maybe I should let go and join those who pretend the past is past, but it's a falsehood I've never learned to spin.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, Two Worlds and in Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan, Volume One

“Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“So, here are my windows, stained all with me.”
― Caitlin R. Kiernan

“That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks no one is watching.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Red Tree

“I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“Demons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.”
― Caitlin R. Kiernan

“I am usually at my most brutally forthright when making shit up. That's the paradox of me.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Red Tree

“I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“Eva was only a slut. She never had the requisite motivation to be anything so useful or lucrative as a whore.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“Maybe I just have everything backwards. Maybe it's a problem of perspective. In this Post-Modern Age perhaps it is the digital experiences we ought to cheer as "genuine " and not those troublesome and inconvenient analog ones.

Looking at it all fucking backwards.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan

“What makes us brave isn't lacking the good sence to be afraid; it's looking back at what we've lived through and seeing if we've faced it well.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan

“No one we knew ever believed that there was anything between us but the sex and some virulent allure, my dirty dishwater circling the drain of you. Not a pretty comparison but maybe it's the best we'll ever deserve, either of us.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Red Tree

“I don't like remembering the way that hurt her. Hurts her. I'm sure it still does; I'm just not around to see, and I don't like dwelling on that, either. That's only normal. Missing people you still love, and not wanting to see them in pain and angry and humiliated.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl

“...and for the first time in her life the tears that had always seemed to flow so easily, had always been there, eager to soothe any loss or ache, had refused to come, and somehow, that had been the most frightening thing of all.

Used 'em all up on trifling shit, and now there's nothing left to cry. Like something her mother used to say or maybe a schoolteacher had said a long time ago. Stop bawling or someday you won't be able to cry, someone you love will die and you won't ever be able to stop hurting.”
― Caitlin R. Kiernan

“The divine is always abominable.
"Houses Under The Sea”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan

“And all the shelves rising up around her like book-lined walls of a fortress, safe in here, always safe in here from the world, guarded by books and all the secrets inside them, all the things hardly anyone else will ever care to learn.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, Threshold