Chris Kelso > Quotes

“McNeil harboured fantasies of his own physical deterioration, about making love to the great wound of the universe, coalescing with.”
― Chris Kelso, Voidheads

“The city is a cage bursting with roaring, tormented animals. The city is alive with purulent cries.”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“In the censored-city, our only access to the outside is through the cloud. Sometimes I feel safer here, with all the screeds of data smog and oversaturated pop culture references condensed to their basic minimum. I mean, the sheer amount of input to our system has long since exceeded our processing capacity. We all felt the same way. Spam and social media had taken over everything. I remember it, clear as day.”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“The town had been cobbled together by child pornographers and lowlifes, tax cheats and deranged psychopaths. North of Wire, upwind of Spittle, drive on past the ergs of Shell County, out beyond Moosejaw and you're there ...
Ersatz was fortified with apathy, clotted by corruption. You go to sleep a boy; wake up an old man.”
― Chris Kelso, The Black Dog Eats the City

“Some black swirl behind a wall said to roil and lust after human flesh and bone, sucking limbs into primal, pre-creation chaos...”
― Chris Kelso, Voidheads

“He drags me outside where the weather is bone-achingly cold. Knelt on the gale-lashed sidewalk I spit out a gruel of blood and look up at the beleaguered Time Detective.

“What’s this about?”

His jaw line clenches, I just know that beneath the chronovisor is a stare completely divorced from reality.

“You’re going to Moscow Novikov.”
― Chris Kelso, The Folger Variation

“I’m sorry, my brain just can’t untangle that into something that’s plausible”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“The two men drag Janice’s half-dissected body out to the front porch and drop her on the wild lawn. She disappears beneath a sea of unploughed yellow strands and broom straw. The sky has a milky hue, Vince realises that he can no longer appreciate the beauty in anything except violence…”
― Chris Kelso, The Dregs Trilogy

“Steve— The decadence… it doesn’t sit well with me, you know? You people are all like something out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel or something… Tom— I’m sure I’d find that devilishly apt if I actually read books Steve, but I don’t so fuck you.”
― Chris Kelso, The Black Dog Eats the City

“A black watery sludge of crippling consciousness sloshes around my head in loose bilge, ebbing and flowing with each panic-surge of electrical energy. The effects soon become psychosomatic: it’s an internal sensation that wets my palms, prickles my scalp with fear and fills the already-clogged neural funnels in my brain space with anti-natal thoughts. I wish I could stem the torrent of noxious bilge water, even for a moment. My head feels constipated.”
― Chris Kelso, Interrogating the Abyss

“Goodwill certainly seems to be in abundance on a superficial
level, but does it have genuine truth or is it some kind of trivial
social camouflage? If it did then surely connection would be
simpler and would occur on a more regular basis. I’m also aware
that the materiality of our reality conditions the connection of
everything with everything else. I know we are cosmically bound,
like the milling atoms of a crystal—interdependent particles
oscillating together in the quest for structural integrity.”
― Chris Kelso

“I’ve concluded that happiness lives in the ephemera. You cannot see it, nor can it be considered tangible. It’s not quite an optical illusion—no, not quite—but if you try to catch it, with the ultimate intention of somehow sustaining it for a prolonged period, then happiness will quickly dissolve to grief and disappointment—inevitably, fatally.”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“I’d risk dying just to dream a happy song”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“My god is a merciless god who hates all his creations equally.”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“The People aren’t undead you understand, no, they are merely the devoted followers of a wealthy psychopath called Miles Dunwoody – a 39 year old real estate heir who pumped all his grandfather’s hard-earned cash into forming The Schism.”
― Chris Kelso, I Dream Of Mirrors

“Let’s argue that reality is plural: the solipsistic loneliness of individual perception becomes our first hurdle. We try to get over that by sharing some kind of rudimentary interior with others—where common goals and grammars can unite and define us as joint proprietors of a greater cognitive space.”
― chris kelso, Interrogating the Abyss