John Langan > Quotes

“Irony sucks, you know?"
Roger nodded. "That it does. Safely confined to the pages of novels, it's an interesting rhetorical device; encountered loose in the real world, it's a beast with steel claws and mirrors for eyes.”
― John Langan

“Despite its abbreviated length, February's always struck me as an especially bleak month, at least in these parts. I know it's not the darkest month, and I know it's not the coldest or the snowiest month, but February is gray in a way I can't explain. In February, all the big happy holidays are gone, and it's weeks and weeks -months, even- until Easter and spring.”
― John Langan

“Bana Abraham demeyin, Abe deyin”
― John Langan

“It’s the problem with the dead. Not only do they remain as they were, they remain as they were to you. No matter what you may learn about them after they’re gone—no matter how much you may come to understand them intellectually—emotionally, they will always be the same.”
― John Langan

“Probably, I could count on one hand the number of times something I’ve said has caused a person to turn pale. Most of those cases would hail from my childhood, when I told one or both of my folks a particularly worrisome piece of news: that I had stepped on a nail in the basement; that kind of thing. Well, add that Saturday morning in early June to the list. Howard’s pale skin went paler, as if you’d poured a glass of milk over a bowl of oatmeal.”
― John Langan

“When Angelo tugged these boots on this morning, tightened and tied the laces, he had no inkling they would be his funeral wear.”
― John Langan

“…but people's memories are short for any sorrow that isn't theirs...”
― John Langan, The Fisherman 546HGFHFG

“Maybe they'd grow angry, the way people do, sometimes, when they're confronted with the marvelous, the fantastic, as if they're upset at the universe for springing this on them.”
― John Langan

“There isn’t much Rainer is proud about any more. In coming to America, he’s had to eat a tableful of humble pie, and he’s learned it goes down best with a smile.”
― John Langan

“But there are some things, no matter if they're true, you can't live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever's squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn't there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can't stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?”
― John Langan

“Two weeks after the accident, a traffic light was hung at the intersection, which I reckon is what four lives is worth these days.”
― John Langan

“Have you ever been so scared of something you move toward it, try to touch it, that kind of thing?”
― John Langan, De Visser

“The cancer was pretty well-advanced, already storming her lymph nodes, and it resisted the radiation and the chemo like some kind of unstoppable beast in a low-grade horror film.”
― John Langan

“I don't know if, deep down, all stories of falling in love are the same. Some days, it seems to me that, once you duck your head beneath the surface details, you find yourself in pretty much the same sequence of events. Other days, I think, No, it's those details that are the point.”
― John Langan

“Don't use your upbringing as excuse, use it as power.”
― John Langan

“Lottie understands that the fear she’s found in him is not a new thing. That it’s been part of her father for a while now. If not originally part of his fundamental architecture, then it’s infiltrated him the way termites will devour the frame of a house, leaving only the brick exterior in place.”
― John Langan, De Visser

“But there are times you pull something out of the water for which there's no accounting, the only remnant of a story whose contours are a mystery.”
― John Langan

“Now, faced with the black ocean, she confronts a vastness that makes the Atlantic seem little more than a pond. As she watches, huge backs slide up out of and back under the waves; Lottie’s reasonably sure they aren’t whales, since no whale she knows of sports a row of spikes down its spine. She has the sense of more, and bigger, beasts waiting beneath the water’s surface, forms as immense as a nightmare. The ocean is everywhere. Not only does it stretch to the horizon in all directions, it’s under everything as well. I don’t mean underground, I mean - it’s fundamental, you might say. If what’s around us is a picture, then this is what it’s drawn on.”
― John Langan