Tim Barrett

“What is more, nobody has ever actually proved him wrong. His chief trouble was that he usually provided such large, indigestible slabs that they stuck in all gullets—even mine, and I would class myself as a fairly wide-gulleted type.”
― John Wyndham, The Kraken Wakes

“For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good.

Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm.

Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal.

That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.

And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Book Eaters

“Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“Believed they could just buy a fallen house at auction, paint a few walls and live happily ever after. He’s tempted to roar with laughter at his delusions, until he suffocates.”
― Adam Nevill, Cunning Folk