Adrian Barnes > Quotes

“Someone once said that we get more difficult to love with each passing year because, over time, our histories grow so tangled that newcomers can no longer bushwhack their way into the thicketed and overgrown depths of our hearts.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Hell is time, isn’t that obvious? Take your greatest pleasure or your greatest fantasy and let it come continuously true—for a day, a week, a year, a decade. And that’s hell.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“I think now that if all eight billion of us had just shut off the lights and gone to bed that night and left it alone we’d have all slept and the chalice would have passed us by. But let’s be real. Whoever leaves anything alone? Life’s a scab, and it’s our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“There’s a natural point in the development of any religion where the prophet becomes first a nuisance and then a positive liability. Just imagine Jesus walking into an evangelical church while the collection plate was being passed around”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Life's a scab, and it's our nature to pick at it until it bleeds.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“And speaking of Escher, it’s worth recording this for posterity: the artists were right, literally right, all along. Beneath what we used to call ‘reality’ there was always an Escheresque, a Boschian, a Munchian fact—a scuttling Guernicopia of horrors just waiting to be discovered once the civilizational rock was finally overturned.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Nobody says these things—it’s against the rules—but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love. Most”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Love a lie. But a real lie, a true lie.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“But as it turns out, love doesn’t set us free—love keeps standing outside the jail on an endless candlelight vigil. So love? Yes, love was pain as well. Especially love.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn’t that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there’s never the slightest guarantee that we’ll wake the next morning. Every little cat nap is a potential game-ender. So why fear death when we are happy and even eager to make that leap of faith each and every night of our lives?”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Children are the eternal, silent witnesses to every human sin, and the more we tatter their purity, the more we extol the clean white blouses of ‘innocence’.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“What we used to blithely call ‘wasting time’ was actually a euphemism for the tenement architecture of our lives; there wasn’t an ounce of waste in a ton of those lost hours. Proof of this could be seen in the fact that even as we imagined we were killing time with movies and phone calls, careers and frozen pizzas, time was slowly but surely killing us. But who knew? It”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“It reminds me of poets, before all this—how the sensitive souls who submitted their work to literary journals outnumbered those who read those same publications by a margin of about ten to one. Everyone wanting to be heard; no one interested in listening.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“didn’t have a lot of time for people; you could say I had my reservations about the species. Maybe I’d spent too much time in the forest of unspoken words to emerge with any confidence in my fellow man.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“After all, what were seashells but empty coffins? What were starfish on the beach but bloated corpses, rotting in an alien environment?”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“That's what you do when you run out of options: you go home.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Sartre, expanding on Descartes, wrote that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“can still hear the contempt in her voice. At times everyone wonders how deeply buried contempt is beneath the surface of their friends’ and lovers’ smiles; most of us suspect—accurately, I believe—that it lies in a shallow grave, gasping for breath beneath a damp mulch of manners and restraint.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“And even if I'd wanted to mourn, four or five million were too many to shed tears over. Tears are more personal than that. We don;t read a news story about twenty thousand dead in an earthquake and weep. at best, we sigh and tell the wife. More often, we shrug and go check our Facebook messages.”
― Adrian Barnes

“If, during any one of a million previous nights, a giant asteroid had smashed the Earth into gravel while we all slept, would it have mattered? With no one left to mourn the wreckage, one could even argue that it wouldn’t be a bad way to end things at all: egalitarian if nothing else. I even thought of a scene in Star Wars where Princess Leia receives news that her home world has been destroyed by Darth Vader’s Death Star. She throws a hairy fit, but two scenes later, she’s back to flirting with Han Solo.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“that the reason we know others exist is because when they look at us, we feel looked at. He called the entity that was staring back at us the Other.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“And we weren’t a species interested in facts, as such. We were more into evading or spinning them.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“I said,’What’s your problem?’ Asshole.” There was a question behind his question, and that shadow question was ‘Do you want to dance?”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“What else do I see? Packs of dogs, heads hovering low, roam the periphery of things. The long-standing human-canine alliance has been irretrievably severed, I’m sincerely sorry to report—the gnawed bones and matted chunks of hair scattered along the shores of Lost Lagoon testify to this. It’s sad, but then again those plump collies and German shepherds don’t seem too weighed down by nostalgia for bone-shaped vegan treats and belly rubs from the opposably-thumbed as they wander about, licking their chops. Anyway, it’s not their fault. We’re the ones who broke the deal.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“What we can’t change has to be a church’, Paul. Get it?”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“most”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“It was a comfortable, familiar apocalypse,”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“Of course, I wasn't completely right in my own head. first off there was the Dream. Sheepishly, I dub it 'the Dream': 'The Dream of Golden Light' sounds like something cheesy from the annals of Chinese Folklore or the ramblings of some wake-and-bake New Age guru. Granted, 'The Dream' sounds a little pretentious, but what other options do I have? And you can't say, given the circumstances, that it doesn't warrant capitalization. Just count yourself lucky that I don't call it THE DREAM, in hysterical all caps.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“How we used to fetishize and differentiate our feelings. Rage! Hatred! Hunger! Pride! Jealousy! Ambition! Lust! We had a name for everything. But that colourful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham. It was all pain—all of it—all along. Rage was pain, hate was pain, pride was pain, lust was pain. All that's different now is that where pain used to have the luxury of being a bit of a drama queen and playing dress up, now it stands out there on the corner of Birchin Lane, quivering and naked.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod

“This is how mighty we are, this is how bold: we'll build a city out of glass on the edge of the ocean, God, and dare you to smash it down.”
― Adrian Barnes, Nod