Jack Ketchum > Quotes

“Black coffee’s a lot like whiskey, you know? All devil and no trimmin’s. Always liked my sins pure and take it as it comes.”
― Jack Ketchum

“As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“I lay in bed and thought about how easy it was to hurt a person. It didn't have to be physical. All you had to do was take a good hard kick at something they cared about.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers.
They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better.”
― Jack Ketchum, Peaceable Kingdom

“The trick of functioning with grief is that of remembering and forgetting all at once. Of letting the ghost walk at your side but not block the way.”
― Jack Ketchum

“pain can work form the outside in.”
― Jack Ketchum

“The worst is missing them, you know? And knowing they won’t be back again. Just knowing that. Sometimes you forget and it’s as though they’re on vacation or something and you think, gee, I wish they’d call. You miss them. You forget they’re really gone. You forget the past six months even happened. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that crazy? Then you catch yourself . . . and it’s real again.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“In the basement, with Ruth, I began to learn that anger, hate, fear and loneliness are all one button awaiting the touch of just a single finger to set them blazing toward destruction.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“Someone once said to me that if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans. Just tell him who you are.”
― Jack Ketchum, Peaceable Kingdom

“The dialogue is solo now. I don’t talk. No matter who’s in bed with me I never do. My thoughts slip off into nightmares sometimes but I don’t share them. I have become now what I only began to be then—completely self-protective.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“She was grinning and she should have been pretty when she grinned. She had good white teeth and a lovely, delicate mouth. But something always went wrong with Denise's smile. There was always something manic in it.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“In the basement, with Ruth, I began to learn that anger, hate, fear and loneliness are all one button awaiting the touch of just a single finger to set them blazing toward destruction. And I learned that they can taste like winning.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“We were just kids. We were property. We belonged to our parents, body and soul. It meant we were doomed in the face of any real danger from the adult world and that meant hopelessness, and humiliation and anger.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“So here my check. Overdue and overdrawn.
Cash it in hell.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“Thinking about writing isn’t writing. Planning to write isn’t writing. Neither is talking about it, posting about it, or complaining how hard it is. These may be part of the process. But only writing is writing.”
― Jack Ketchum, Writers On Writing: An Author's Guide Vol. 1

“Sympathy can turn so quickly. Just add fear. Stir.”
― Jack Ketchum, Hide and Seek

“But I figure passion’s like the wind in the trees out there. Blows hard for a while and feels strong and clean while it’s blowing and maybe it even blows so long and hard that you start living with it. It feels like the wind’s a part of you, like it’s essential, if you know what I mean, something you can hardly imagine life without. But it’s got to pass. So you can get on with things without all the confusion of that wind in your hair.”
― Jack Ketchum, Red

“You got to tell me the brave captain Why are the wicked so strong? How do the angels get to sleep When the devil leaves the porch light on?” —Tom Waits”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“Black coffee's a lot like whiskey, you know? All devil and no trimmin's. Always liked my sins pure and take it as it comes.”
― Jack Ketchum, Off Season

“People were complex creatures, walking, talking rag quilts, youthful dreams and hopes and fears and middle-aged indiscretions, aging aches and pains and losses, the whole damn kit and kaboodle, mended here and tattered there. People were pushed and pulled in all sorts of directions and did whatever it was they had to do for balance.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Lost

“Crayfish,” I said. I dumped out a tin of water. “Really?” I nodded. “Big ones?” “Not these. You can find them, though.” “Can I see?” She dropped down off the bank just like a boy would, not sitting first, just putting her left hand to the ground and vaulting the three-foot drop to the first big stone in the line that led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment and then crossed to the Rock. I was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I made room for her. There was suddenly this fine clean smell sitting next to me. Her eyes were green. She looked around. To all of us back then the Rock was something special. It sat smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and fast around it.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“Fighting for your life is a fucking ball. As long as you didn’t get slaughtered.”
― Jack Ketchum, Off Season

“I lay in bed and thought how easy it was to hurt a person. It didn’t have to be physical. All you had to do was take a good hard kick at something they cared about.”
― Jack Ketchum

“A tired life breeds tired decisions, sometimes none at all.”
― Jack Ketchum, Hide and Seek

“You think you know about pain?
Talk to my second wife. She does. Or she thinks she does.
She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats fighting – her own cat and a neighbor’s – and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you still can see today, scared her so badly she fell back down her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury. Thirty-six stitches I think she said she got. And a fever that lasted days.
My second wife says that’s pain.
She doesn’t know shit, that woman.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“Pain can work from the outside in. I mean that sometimes what you see is pain. Pain in its cruelest, purest form.”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“He was a good man and a kind man but he never knew what he wanted. I think that eventually it killed him.”
― Jack Ketchum, Red

“can. “New York City, huh?” “Yup.” She rolled up her sleeves and dipped down into the water. And that was when I noticed the scar. “Jeez. What’s that?” It started just inside her left elbow and ran down to the wrist like a long pink twisted worm. She saw where I was looking. “Accident,” she said. “We were in a car.” Then she looked back into the water where you could see her reflection shimmering. “Jeez.” But then she didn’t seem to want to talk much after that. “Got any more of ’em?” I don’t know why scars are always so fascinating to boys, but they are, it’s a fact of life, and I just couldn’t help it. I couldn’t shut up about it yet. Even though I knew she wanted me to, even though”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“You had room for four kids sitting or six standing up. It had been a pirate ship, Nemo’s Nautilus, and a canoe for the Lenni Lennape among other things. Today the water was maybe three and a half feet deep. She seemed happy to be there, not scared at all. “We call this the Big Rock,” I said. “We used to, I mean. When we were kids.” “I like it,” she said. “Can I see the crayfish? I’m Meg.” “I’m David. Sure.” She peered down into the can. Time went by and we said nothing. She studied them. Then she straightened up again. “Neat.” “I just catch ‘em and look at ’em awhile and then let them go.” “Do they bite?” “The big ones do. They can’t hurt you, though. And the little ones just try to run.” “They look like lobsters.” “You never saw a crayfish before?”
― Jack Ketchum, The Girl Next Door

“To her eyes, used to diversity, there was a troubling uniformity about them all, something that spoke of isolation, and a dull and thoughtless cruelty.”
― Jack Ketchum, Off Season