Craig Davidson > Quotes

“Reality never changes. Only our recollections of it do. Whenever a moment passes, we pass along with it into the realm of memory. And in that realm, geometries change. Contours shift, shades lighten, objectivities dissolve. Memory becomes what we need it to be.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“Love is a sickness. Some kind of a pathogen existing above all explanation.”
― Craig Davidson, Sarah Court

“Imagine trying to hold the tail of a comet as it blazes across the heavens. It’s burning your hands, eating you up, but there’s no malice in it; a comet can’t possibly know or care about you. You will sacrifice all you are or ever will be for that comet because it suffuses every inch of your skin with a sweet itch you cannot catch, and through its grace you discover velocities you never dreamt possible.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“we are only human, a condition of perpetual uncertainty and failure.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“I figured some people have edges that don’t allow them to slot neatly into the holes society expects them to fit into, that was all.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“I figured a woman can't be understood the way a man can. Women have purposes men can't even imagine.”
― Craig Davidson, Cataract City

“No boy owes his parents. Parents owe their children everything, always and unconditionally, and that’s just the way it goes.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“I was scared—with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I’d ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You’re no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child: that you’d die in convulsions from inhaling the gas from a shattered lightbulb, that chewing apple pips brought on death by cyanide poisoning, or that a circus dwarf had actually bounced off a trampoline into the mouth of a hungry hippo. You stop believing in the things my uncle believed in. Even if your mind wants to go there, it has lost the nimbleness needed to make the leap. That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out—or worse, you steal it from yourself. It gets embarrassed out of you by the kids who run the same stretch of streets and grown-ups who say it’s time to put away childish things. By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you’d grow up to be.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“How deeply do any of us know our own selves? Ask yourself. We hold a picture of how we wish to be and hope it goes forever unchallenged. Passing through life never pursuing aspects of our natures with which we'd rather not reckon. Dying strangers to ourselves.”
― Craig Davidson

“You might think my chosen career would lend me insight…. But while I can tell you about the brain as a physical object…, beyond that I am a glorified techie. I know the nuts and bolts and can diagnose flaws within the mainframe. While I can identify and sometimes fix structural maladies within that organ, I do not remotely understand it. That is an impossible task, like trying to guess the path rainwater will take down a windowpane. There is simply no way to know with any accuracy what is happening inside someone else’s head. I only faintly comprehend what is going on inside my own.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“The truth is that abandoned dog following you over sea and land, baying from barren clifftops, never tiring and never quitting, forever pining after you—and the day will come when that dog is on your porch, scratching insistently at your door, forcing you to claim it once again.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“You always fall hardest the first time, don’t you? There’s no bottom to it.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“Everybody could be doing something better without their lives. Name me one person who is doing the best, most righteous thing with their life this very minute.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“You and I are cobbled out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. We could have a carbon cell in one of our elbows that was once part of a trilobite's tail. Or a cell from Atilla the Hun's moustache in our eye. Or an ancient lotus petal in our tonsils.”
― Craig Davidson, Precious Cargo: My Year of Driving the Kids on School Bus 3077

“I stood in the hallway, unable to offer my uncle any comfort for his wretched need. I understand now that I was just a kid, at that stage where we’re good at forcing others to deal with our own outbursts but less adept when dealing with the painful emotions of others. I had no idea how to help, and . . . and I was so scared.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“Sometimes, Jake, disappeared is worse than dead. With dead, at least there’s an end.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“For some of the kids on my bus, the deviation is so small: an imperfection in the DNA strand so tiny that an electron microscope cranked to 100,000X magnification shows but a shadow. A knot of rogue atoms. Weightless. A body forms itself around that anomaly, and next comes a life, and the lives of that person's family.”
― Craig Davidson, Precious Cargo: My Year of Driving the Kids on School Bus 3077

“Our boy owes us nothing. No boy owes his parents. Parents owe their children everything, always and unconditionally, and that's just the way it goes.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“Twenty-seven bones make up the human hand. Lunate and capitate and navicular, scaphoid, and triquetrum, the tiny horn-shaped pisiforms of the outer wrist. Though different in shape and density each is smoothly aligned and flush-fitted, lashed by a meshwork of ligatures running under the skin. All vertebrates share a similar set of bones, and all bones grow out of the same tissue: a bird's wing, a whale's dorsal fine, a gecko's pad, your own hand. Bust an arm or leg and the knitting bone's sealed in a wrap of calcium so it's stronger than before. Bust a bone in your hand and it never heals right.”
― Craig Davidson, Rust and Bone: Stories

“You can't hate your best friend for taking opportunities he'd been given. That would be the worst sort of hate, wouldn't it? Because it would mean you hate yourself, too.”
― Craig Davidson, Cataract City

“So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever hear you.”
― Craig Davidson, Cataract City

“I was scared- with that crystalline, childish fear of being caught and punished. That fear thrashed behind my rib cage like a bird in cupped hands, perhaps the last truly childlike instance of that emotion I'd ever feel. That fear is a kind of magic. As you get older, the texture of your fear changes. You're no longer afraid of the things you had absolute faith in as a child ... That magic gets kicked out of you, churched out, shamed out- or worse, you steal it from yourself ... By degrees, you kill your own magic. Before long your fears become adult ones: crushing debts and responsibilities, sick parents and sick kids, the possibility of dying unremembered or unloved. Fears of not being the person you were so certain you'd grow up to be. Looking back, I wish I'd relished those final instants of childish fear: that saccharine-sweet taste of terror curdling like sour milk in my mouth.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“Honestly, my dear, I find myself struggling to care.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“Did you know that the Russians sent dogs into space? My mother told me this when I was a boy. Nobody knew the effects of space on a body, you see, so they sent dogs first. They found two little mongrels on the streets of Moscow. Pchelka, which means Little Bee, and Mushka, which means Little Fly. They went up in Sputnik 6. They were supposed to get into orbit and come right back. But the rockets misfired and shot them into space.

Whenever I look at the night sky, I think about those dogs. Wearing these hand-stitched spacesuits, bright orange, with their paws sticking out. Big fishbowl helmets. How… crazy. Floating out and out into space. How bewildered they must have been, dying from oxygen deprivation. For what? They would have happily spent their days rummaging through trashcans.

For all anyone knows these dogs are still out there. Two dead mongrels in a satellite. Two dog skeletons in silly spacesuits. Gleaming dog skulls inside fishbowl helmets. They’ll spin through the universe until they burn up in the atmosphere of an uncharted planet. Or get sucked into a black hole to be crushed into a ball of black matter no bigger than an ant turd.”
― Craig Davidson, Cataract City

“Funny how meaningful those small tender gestures can be: a friend picking burrs off your shirt, the ones you can’t get because they’re stuck in that unreachable spot on your back.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“Imagine trying to hold the tail of a comet as it blazes across the heavens. It’s burning your hands, eating you up, but there’s no malice in it; a comet can’t possibly know or care about you. You will sacrifice all you are or ever will be for that comet because it suffuses every inch of your skin with a sweet itch you cannot scratch, and through its grace you discover velocities you never dreamed possible. You will love that comet, but part of that love—a percentage impossible to calibrate—is tied to your inability to understand it. How can that comet burn as it does, pursue the trajectory it does? It confuses you, because the comet disguises itself as a human girl. But make no mistake, the girl contains fire to evaporate oceans, light to blind minor gods. If I could freeze her in the heartbeat where she skipped across the footbridge, carve her out of time and fix her in the firmament . . . in the deepest chambers of my heart, I know that nobody, not another soul on earth, will ever be as purely astonishing as Dove Yellowbird was in that moment.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“As far as I was concerned, there was nothing wrong with being an odd duck. I figured some people have edges that don’t allow them to slot into the holes society expects them to fit into, that was all.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club

“It boiled down to this: it’s a lot harder to love than to hate. Harder to be there for those you love—to see them get older, get sick, be taken from you in sudden awful ways. Hate’s dead simple. You can hate an utter stranger from a thousand miles away. It asks nothing of you. It eats you from the inside out but it takes no effort or thought at all.”—Craig Davidson from Cataract City”
― Craig Davidson

“They say a man can change his personality—the basic essence of who or what he is—by five percent. Five percent: the total change any one of us is capable of. At first it sounds trivial. Five percent, what’s that? A fingernail paring. But consider the vastness of the human psyche and that number acquires real weight. Think five percent of the Earth’s total landmass, five percent of the known universe. Millions of square acres, billions of light years. Consider how a change of five percent could alter anyone. Imagine dominoes lined in neat straight rows, the world of possibilities set in motion at a touch. Five percent: everything changes. Five percent: a whole new person. Considered in these terms, five percent really means something. Considered in these terms, five percent is colossal.”
― Craig Davidson, Fighter

“Our memories change over time. Some of this change comes through aging. But a much greater part of the change has to do with how we want to remember. The more distant a memory becomes, the more our minds manipulate it. The reasons for this are multiple, but often render down to: I want to remember myself, my own history and the people I care for in this specific way. So, our brains oblige.”
― Craig Davidson, The Saturday Night Ghost Club