Kathe Koja > Quotes

“To work and work and never mind why; if you kept looking for the why behind everything you might never work again, you might never bother to breathe again.”
― Kathe Koja, Skin

“Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don't think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I'm not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be. Not you. Not me either. Because it's rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I'll take my now, waking with a lover's scent on me, around me, take my hopes before they're maybe tragedy; a good morning is a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.”
― Kathe Koja

“Do you know the concept of karma? It’s kind of like a circle, or cause-and-effect, like a slow-tolling bell you rang maybe a year ago, five years ago, maybe in another lifetime if you believe in that. Karma means that what you do today, and why you do it, makes you who you are forever: as if you were clay, and every thought and action left a mark in that clay, bent it, shaped it, even ruined it… but with karma there are no excuses, no explanations, no I-didn’t-really-mean-it-so-can-I-have-some-more-clay. Karma takes everything you do very, very seriously.”
― Kathe Koja, Buddha Boy

“I used to send my characters into a fire that necessarily consumed them, but I have learned, a little, how to send them through the fire to a new place. The characters who do not change — most notably Nakota in Cipher, Bibi in Skin, and Lena in Kink — are motivated by an essential selfishness or self-centeredness, an unwillingness to relinquish control to the process, a refusal to become.”
― Kathe Koja

“If I could have broken his neck I would have, just for the pleasure of the silence after the snap.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“The stage is not only a world apart, it is a myriad of worlds, and in those worlds a man can have anything he fancies, if only he believes in what he sees.”
― Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy

“I'm just going to jump and say:hey Mom, Dad, I'm gay, What's for dessert?”
― Kathe Koja

“You see, that hunger inside us, that ambition, or whatever you may choose to call it, is a compass really, a compass of true desire. And if you will be happy, you must follow that desire, no matter which way the needle points.”
― Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy

“I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“In history, in a movie, in a book, you can always tell who the heroes are;
they're the ones rushing into a burning building, giving crucial testimony in
the courtroom, refusing to step to the back of the bus. They're the ones who
act the way you hope you would, if the moment came to you.
But the movies and the history books never tell you how they felt, those
heroes, if they were angry or uncertain or afraid, if they had to think a
long time before they did the right thing, if they even knew what the right
thing was or just made a headlong guess, just leaped and hoped they landed
instead of falling. They never tell you what it's like to stand on the
brink, wishing you were somewhere--or someone--else, wishing the choice had
never come your way and you could just go back to your safe, ordinary,
everyday life.
Because you know what else the books never say? Nobody, hero or not, really
wants to rush into a fire. Because fire burns.”
― Kathe Koja, Buddha Boy

“I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“The verge, he likes to say. That's where we want them, the utter, utter verge.”
― Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy

“If there is any God in this world, He lives in a theatre.”
― Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy

“Gone as usual in the morning, and me left behind and naked, inner thighs lightly scaled with the dried spoor of our lovemaking: she liked to stay on top afterward and let the juice run down, and I liked whatever she liked. Imagining in the shower that I could smell her still, the angular scent of those secret bones, had she always smelled so fierce and so good? Recalling those gone times, old memories lit by the fire of the new, I did not this time wonder how long it would last; I was too smart for that now. Take what you get, and don’t think. Of course it could never be that easy, but there were moments, like now, that I could successfully pretend that it was, and I had no inclination to try to peer past those moments. I’m not one who wants to know the future: at the best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“and wasn’t rust growth, of a kind? the growth of decay? If you don’t grow, you die;”
― Kathe Koja, Skin

“there is such peace in helplessness,”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t know it was loaded, I didn’t think things would turn out this way. It’s so easy to be nothing. It requires very little thought or afterthought, you can always find people to drink with you, hang out with you, everybody needs a little nothing in their life, right? Call the specialist when you do. You don’t even have to call, chances are I’ll already be there, you’ve just overlooked me because I’m in a corner, crouched like a dustball, a cobweb, my busy little spaced-out grin and oops it seems I’ve stumbled on some sort of exalted hellhole, Funhole, do excuse me while I let it out, while I let it into my body, while I let it run my life because somebody has to, right? somebody has to take the goddamned brunt even if it’s a void.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“The worst wounds are internal, I should have known that from my own experience, but I’m the type of guy who doesn’t learn.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“She opened my closet door just the tiniest crack. So I could breathe.”
― Kathe Koja

“You can get used to being wrong all the time; it takes all the responsibility out of things.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“In his comfortable coffin, face veiled in dark silk, eyes open or closed, Pan Loudermilk lies waiting, a player from a tribe never stilled so much as gathered, potential as potent as a knife in the scabbard, a poem in the mind, a wind that rises as a breeze in the tropics, later to lash the wintry coastline, and smash its boats and sailors on the shore. Or perhaps that is purest make-believe, as a puppet is only a tool, made of wood, and wool, and wire. As we are blood, and fancy, and bites of bone and dream.”
― Kathe Koja, Under the Poppy

“Making no living as a card-carrying poet had accustomed me to a philosophy that made minimalism seem lavish, I had lived like a cockroach for so long that a full tank, a full refrigerator were no longer even desirable: I mean, what would I do with it all?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I knew that change was coming, the way you know things you can't see, by feeling them; by instinct. The way the bees know everything they know.”
― Kathe Koja, Kissing the Bee

“You can know something and never think about it, if you’re any good at it. Me, now, I’ve been avoiding so much for so long that the real trick becomes thinking straight. Beside”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“Maddeningly beautiful. and faint as an insect choir, like standing in the dark and glimpsing—the barest peripheral, an image behind your eyelids—the passing of your one desire, close enough to nuzzle if you could only fix its motion, see it all the way.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“[Lindsay] But I don't want to think about all that now, Boring Blake and his broken heart which is really his deflated dick, that's all he cares about anyway...”
― Kathe Koja, Talk

“As the invaders caught the villagers and tore into them, they made soothing, crooning noises that somehow drowned out the shrieking. They strangled the villagers, tore their eyes out, opened their throats with sharp teeth. They rolled the bodies over the edge of the platform, into the sand. When they couldn’t find any more victims, they went into the little houses and closed the doors.   *”
― Kathe Koja, Year's Best Weird Fiction; Volume 2

“All bodies are, in some sense; engines driven by the health or disease of their owners, jackets of flesh that are the physical sum of their wearers. But to become your disease? To become the consumption itself?”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“smile again, something older, colder than reptilian, cold as the oldest brain of all speaking, short wordless bursts, the back of the back of the skull: “Let’s see,” she said, “who can keep the most secrets. And be the most surprised in the end.”
― Kathe Koja, Skin

“You always think you’d like it if the Twilight Zone came true. You can forget that shit.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher