George Hopper

“His heart kicked. Everything in him seemed to rise up, as if threatening to exit his body through the top of his head, then to drop, carrying him to the floor. His mind was a blank, all other thoughts blown to its margins by Tony’s ravaged body. That blank, he understood a moment later, was a grief so immediate and profound it doubled him over, flooding his eyes with tears, forcing sobs from his lips. No matter that one part of his brain had resumed the this-doesn’t-make-sense complaint (as the blood demonstrated, the man in front of him had been dead for days, at least; even if there were another explanation for that detail, August should have heard the sounds of his father’s murder, despite the screaming that vibrated the air). Tony’s corpse made all of that seem inconsequential, irrelevant.”
― John Langan, Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies

“Oy sat by Jake’s head, now silent, knowing his howls could no longer be heard by the one for whom he grieved. What the gunslinger feared most had come to pass. While he had been talking to two men he didn’t like, the boy whom he loved more than all others—more than he’d loved anyone ever in his life, even Susan Delgado—had passed beyond him for the second time. Jake was dead.”
― Stephen King, The Dark Tower

“But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?”
― John Langan, The Fisherman

“In one of his stories, Lovecraft wrote something that I've never forgotten. It's stayed with me all these years. He said, "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents”
― Sam Gafford, The Dreamer in Fire and Other Stories