Nick Cutter > Quotes

“The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“How could you hide from a murderer who lives under your skin?”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“It came down to that flexibility of a person’s mind. An ability to withstand horrors and snap back, like a fresh elastic band. A flinty mind shattered. In this way, he was glad not to be an adult. A grown-up’s mind—even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim—lacked that elasticity. The world had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity. Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child—leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. Or maybe there is: you just grow up. And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed . . . well, they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening. That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“They’d made a pact to be friends forever, but forever could be so, so brief.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“You hold on to life until it gets ripped away from you. Even if it gets ripped away in pieces. You just hold on.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man?

Edgerton asks me with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris.

It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it’s hopeless. It’s like the end is always there, you can’t escape it, but things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything’s been stripped away. Their bodies and happiness and hope.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“The water wasn't the same down here.

Water is what runs out of the kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean- but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know.

You're trapped within it, a plaything of it.

Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure.

The pressure.

The soul can't cope with that. It shouldn't be expected to.

Humans weren't built for this. There's a reason nothing lives down here.

Or nothing should.”
― Nick Cutter, The Deep

“Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned.”
― Nick Cutter, The Deep

“Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it's hopeless. It's like the end is always there, you can't escape it. But things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything's been stripped away, their bodies and happiness and hope. Things just don't know when to die, I wish they did. I wish my friends had known that, sort of anyway. But I'm glad they tried, that's part of being human right? Part of being any living thing. You hold onto life until it gets ripped away from you, even if it gets ripped away in pieces, you just hold on.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That's what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the "right people," whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child-leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement's light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There's no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears.
Or maybe there is: you just grow up.
And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things-but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed... well, they can't summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don't believe it could be happening.
That's what's different about kid: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Prepare the lifeboats, mates! The SS Sanity is capsizing! We're going down!”
― Nick Cutter, The Deep

“He began to cry then, clutching LB. The tears came easily. He had not cried tears of such distilled regret since his son had gone missing. LB was going limp, either spent, tired of fighting, or resigned to her fate. Luke hugged her so, so tight. He wanted LB to remember his touch. The warmth and love that radiated from his whole body, coupled with the sadness that she was being ripped away from him. He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.”
― Nick Cutter, The Deep

“Fear finds a home in you. It finds the softest spots imaginable and sets up residence.”
― Nick Cutter, Little Heaven

“The dividing line between genius and insanity is very thin and quite permeable—which is why so many geniuses descend into madness.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Adults are obsolete children.” —DR. SEUSS”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“They say cockroaches will be the last things left on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Don't believe it. The last thing on earth will be a worm in the guts of those cockroaches, sucking them dry.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.”
― Nick Cutter, The Deep

“It’s all so goddamn fragile. Your life and the thread you carry it on. And the more love you carry, the more stress you put on that thread, the better chance it will snap. But what choice do any of us have? You take on that love because to live without it is to exist as half a person. You give that love away because it is in you to give, not out of a desire for recompense. And you keep loving even when the world cracks open and reveals a black hole where all that love can get swallowed.”
― Nick Cutter, Little Heaven

“It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people the love they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction.

A person profited nothing from being good.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply. “A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do.”
― Nick Cutter, Little Heaven

“The notion that adulthood is this place Harry and I were moving toward, and right now we’re collecting baggage, suitcases stuffed with stress and sadness, but we actually need those because what’s inside will furnish our new homes over in Adultland. And as soon as we get there, we’ll start collecting more so that when we die, the coroner’ll say it was anal cancer or heart failure, but really it was the weight of all we’d been carrying.”
― Nick Cutter, The Queen

“If there was one thing he wanted to tell his lost friends, it was that lots of adults didn’t have a goddamn clue. It was one of the sadder facts he’d had to come to grips with. Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop

“An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was—what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?”
― Nick Cutter, Little Heaven

“Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.”
― Nick Cutter, The Troop