Eric > Recent Status Updates

“I don’t want to go to Sweden. Remember our last trip to Scandinavia?”

Hellboy nodded. “Of course. But there aren’t gonna be any lunatic shapeshifting seals this trip.”

“How do you know?”

“You don’t want to go? Be that way,” Hellboy said with some finality. “I just figured you’d be glad you didn’t have to testify in front of that committee tomorrow.”

“They weren’t seals.”

“Whatever.” p.33

"You told me you would come back," Christine Gillette says. "And you did. You're here."

Jennifer blinks, her eyes heating up, her heart trying to escape her chest.

Girls without mothers fall apart on the inside when someone like Christine Gillette remembers them, notices their new hair. p.120

Yes, I literally timed it so that I would finish my 2023 challenge a few minutes before midnight. Happy new year everyone!!!

"Complete specimens have such uncanny resemblance to certain creatures of primal myth that suggestion of ancient existence outside antarctic becomes inevitable. Dyer and Pabodie have read Necronomican and seen Clark Ashton Smith's nightmare paintings based on text, and will understand when I speak of Elder Things supposed to have created all earth-life as jest or mistake."
CAS exists in the mythos!

Maybe the process of becoming something horrible wasn't about temptation to sin, forbidden delights, and bad impulse control.

Maybe it was about choosing to throw your soul into a meat grinder, over and over again. Until what remained couldn't even be seen as a soul any longer. Maybe the real monsters, the big bad monsters, aren't created.

They're forged. Hammered. One blow at a time.

I was mortal once...

"People just can't get beyond the norm," Jim said. "They see the surface of things, and if that's acceptable, they have no inclination to go deeper. Too much trouble. Too much thinking involved. And too much fear."

"Fear of the unknown?"

Jim shrugged, then shook his head. "Fear of knowing too much," he said. p.240

After all this time, I'm finally ready to finish the story.

On some other world, possibly it is different. Better. There are clear good and evil alternatives. Not these obscure admixtures, these blends, with no proper tool by which to untangle the components.

We do not have the ideal world, such as we would like, where morality is easy because cognition is easy. Where one can do right with no effort because he can detect the obvious.

And then, all at once, without warning of any kind, he felt sick with rage. I thought this was over, he said to himself. Does it have to go on forever? The war ended years ago. And we thought it was finished then. But that Africa Fiasco...

That Herr Hope is right, he thought. With his joke about our contact on Mars. Mars populated by Jews. We would see them there, too. p. 135

They want to be the agents, not the victims, of history. They identify with God’s power and believe they are godlike. That is their basic madness. They are overcome by some archetype; their egos have expanded psychotically so that they cannot tell where they begin and the godhead leaves off... Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man. p. 42

That's another thing she's promised and sworn, mumbled vows about, never to drink beer like him. Cigarettes, sure, smoking doesn't make you stupid, just dead. But if she ever drinks, then that opens the door on a future where she someday shares a beer with her dad, and that's not a door she'll ever let life drag her through. p. 228

Final girls don't wear combat boots to school, untied in honor of John Bender. Final girls' wrists aren't open to the world. Final girls are all, of course - this goes without saying - virgins. Final girls don't wear "Metal Up Your Ass" shirts to school... Final girls never select the SKANK STATION mirror, or wear this much eyeliner - they don't need to. Their eyes are already piercing and perfect.

I think she was saying that if my dad would have just applied the same energy and forethought to his regalia and his routine as he did to what trouble there was to get in once the sun came down, there would have been no stopping him.

That’s how you talk about dead people, though, especially dead Indians. It’s all about squandered potential, not actual accomplishments.

Abe Sapien thought of being stranded in time, alone, the only one of his kind, seeking community in the company of ghosts. Of humanity’s dismissal of him as a sideshow freak. Of the prejudices of little people, against him, and against what he represented. He hated humanity—and every other phylum that could despise him so much with no cause.

Sometimes I wish Darth Vader had been my father. I’d have been better off. I wouldn’t have a right hand, but I definitely wouldn’t have the burden of being black and constantly having to decide when and if I gave a shit about it. Plus, I’m left-handed.

I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is. p.219

I kicked a partially burned tome away from the fire. The cover was charred but still readable, The Great Blacksby, page one of which was:

Real talk. When I was young, dumb, and full of cum, my omnipresent, good to my mother, non-stereotypical African-American daddy dropped some knowledge on me that I been trippin’ off of ever since.

Using my lighter, I finished torching the book myself... p. 165

“I ever tell you all about the time I fucked the shit out of Darla on the He Man Woman Hater’s Club set during our twentieth reunion?”

I didn’t realize it then, but Hominy, like any other child star still standing in the klieg light afterglow of a long-ago canceled career, was bat-shit crazy. We thought that he was being funny; dry humping the TV with every low-angle shot of Darla’s exposed lace panties. p.69

But I don’t feel responsible anymore. I understand now that the only time black people don’t feel guilty is when we’ve actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief. In the way that cooning is a relief, voting Republican is a relief, marrying white is a relief—albeit a temporary one. p.18

But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.

We were half mad anyways. All lined up. Delawares and all. Every man save Glanton and he was a study. We hauled forth our members and at it we went and the judge on his knees kneadin the mass with his naked arms and the piss was splashin about and he was cryin out to us to piss, man, piss for your very souls for cant you see the redskins yonder...

We walked past the sign, into the darkness, and I stuck out my hand. The big one that I like to call, in my more poetic moments, The Big One. I think this matches my Big Gun and my Big Bullets. Other large accoutrements are not discussed in mixed company, or in the company of dour reverends, or in reports to the Bureau, but if you would like to ask in private, I can explain. p. 27

"I’ve renounced the devil and his ways,” Hellboy said calmly. “The material you received from the Bureau told you that.”

"Ha! ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ Jeremiah 13:23!”

Hellboy shrugged and walked to the door. “‘I’ll be seeing you.’ Sammy Fain, music, Irving Kahal, lyrics.” He walked out.

When you cast Magelight on accident:

“You made it?” she asked. “What is it?”

The orb shuddered, then began to drift across the clearing toward the opposing wall of trees.

“I think we are meant to follow it,” he said.

“You are not certain?”

Tezca flushed. “I am certain,” he said. “We follow it.” He stalked forward after the orb, and Xhoc followed.

"Let it be like this.
Let the water clear away
so the plate of earth
comes toward the light.
Let the land gather
and level out.

Then it can be sown.
Then the dawn can come."

"But there will be no words of praise or prayer
to sing of what we frame and shape
until humanity is born, until true people have been made," they said.

When it was time to make the earth:
it only took a word.
To make earth they said, "Earth."

“... And you’re both wrong about each other, you know. You don’t really know who he is. Not yet. And he doesn’t know you. And you both hurt each other terribly, because you’re family. Because what you say and do matters so much more than anyone else... But the reason it hurts so much is because you care about each other so much. And that pain will eventually fade. But you’ll both still care.”

"A young man will come to me for advice. He’ll say, ‘I saw one who did it. I was sixteen then, but I’m twenty now. I have a gun. Will you turn me in if I settle the matter?’ I’ll have to say, ‘I, too, lost much family, but I didn’t know them....’ So if this soldier asks my advice, what do I tell him? ...This isn’t going away in one year or two years or five years or ten years—this horror that we saw. It’s intrinsic.”

To their minds, it seemed, their acts of decency exonerated the guilt of their crimes. But to survivors, the fact that a killer sometimes spared lives only proved that he could not possibly be judged innocent, since it demonstrated plainly that he knew murder was wrong.

... Odette said to me. “Even this Mr. Rutaganda, who saved my children, should be hanged in a public place, and I will go there.” p. 130