Quotes by American Authors - Page 18

Beer gurgled through the beard. 'You see,' the young man began, 'the desert's so big you can't be alone in it. Ever notice that? It's all empty and there's nothing in sight, but there's always something moving over there where you can't quite see it. It's something very dry and thin and brown, only when you look around it isn't there. Ever see it?''Optical fatigue -' Tallant began.'Sure. I know. Every man to his own legend. There isn't a tribe of Indians hasn't got some way of accounting for it. You've heard of the Watchers? And the twentieth-century white man comes along, and it's optical fatigue. Only in the nineteenth century things weren't quite the same, and there were the Carkers.''You've got a special localized legend?''Call it that. You glimpse things out of the corner of your mind, same like you glimpse lean, dry things out of the corner of your eye. You incase 'em in solid circumstance and they're not so bad. That is known as the Growth of Legend. The Folk Mind in Action. You take the Carkers and the things you don't quite see and put 'em together. And they bite.'Tallant wondered how long that beard had been absorbing beer. 'And what were the Carkers?' he prompted politely.'Ever hear of Sawney Bean? Scotland - reign of James the First or maybe the Sixth, though I think Roughead's wrong on that for once. Or let's be more modern - ever hear of the Benders? Kansas in the 1870's? No? Ever hear of Procrustes? Or Polyphemus? Or Fee-fi-fo-fum?'There are ogres, you know. They're no legend. They're fact, they are. The inn where nine guests left for every ten that arrived, the mountain cabin that sheltered travelers from the snow, sheltered them all winter till the melting spring uncovered their bones, the lonely stretches of road that so many passengers traveled halfway - you'll find 'em everywhere. All over Europe and pretty much in this country too before communications became what they are. Profitable business. And it wasn't just the profit. The Benders made money, sure; but that wasn't why they killed all their victims as carefully as a kosher butcher. Sawney Bean got so he didn't give a damn about the profit; he just needed to lay in more meat for the winter.'And think of the chances you'd have at an oasis.''So these Carkers of yours were, as you call them, ogres?''Carkers, ogres - maybe they were Benders. The Benders were never seen alive, you know, after the townspeople found those curiously butchered bodies. There's a rumor they got this far West. And the time checks pretty well. There wasn't any town here in the 80s. Just a couple of Indian families - last of a dying tribe living on at the oasis. They vanished after the Carkers moved in. That's not so surprising. The white race is a sort of super-ogre, anyway. Nobody worried about them. But they used to worry about why so many travelers never got across this stretch of desert. The travelers used to stop over at the Carkers, you see, and somehow they often never got any further. Their wagons'd be found maybe fifteen miles beyond in the desert. Sometimes they found the bones, too, parched and white. Gnawed-looking, they said sometimes.''And nobody ever did anything about these Carkers?''Oh, sure. We didn't have King James the Sixth - only I still think it was the First - to ride up on a great white horse for a gesture, but twice there were Army detachments came here and wiped them all out.''Twice? One wiping-out would do for most families.'Tallant smiled at the beery confusion of the young man's speech.'Uh-huh, That was no slip. They wiped out the Carkers twice because you see once didn't do any good. They wiped 'em out and still travelers vanished and still there were white gnawed bones. So they wiped 'em out again. After that they gave up, and people detoured the oasis.("They Bite")
Anthony Boucher
This was in the good old days, when monsters were fantasy.
Hollis Seamon
Solomon breathed a sigh of relief ever so slightly, thankful that the cricket had not been eaten. Not that he was concerned for the cricket being eaten. No, he was simply relieved that the voice in the closet, which could be a monster, had not eaten it. If the voice had eaten the cricket, that meant that he was a monster that eats things in the night, and Solomon too could be eaten. Being eaten by a closet monster was perhaps the scariest thing that could happen to an elephant, not to mention a cricket, as far as Solomon was concerned.
Michael Delaware
Human beings are no damn good,” he said. “We are even worse than animals. We like ...”He trailed off, cleared his throat, but his voice hardly reached a whisper.“We like monsters,” he said.
Victor LaValle
Monsters’ can help us by giving a tangible form to our secret fears. It is less widely appreciated today that ‘wonders’ such as the unicorn legitimize our hopes. But all imaginary animals, to some degree all animals, are ultimately both monsters and wonders, which assist us by deflecting and absorbing our uncertainties . It is hard to tell ‘imaginary animals’ from symbolic, exemplary, heraldic, stylized, poetic, literary, or stereotypical ones. What is reality? Until we answer that question with confidence, a sharp differentiation between real animals and imaginary ones will remain elusive. There is some yeti in every ape, and a bit of Pegasus in every horse. Men and women are not only part angel and part demon, as the old cliché goes; they are also part centaur, part werewolf, part mandrake, and part sphinx.
Boria Sax
I can turn into anything," he said with emphasis. "Even another werewolf." When Daisy blinked back at him, too dumbfounded to speak, Talent laughed, heartily. She'd been correct. He was devastating when he truly smiled. "Haven't you learned, woman? You've fallen off the map. Here there be monsters.
Kristen Callihan
I cannot be assured ofexactly what I createdbe it madness and monsteror beauty and light.
Stephanie Hemphill
I’m always looking for the monster. Not even just in horror. I want them in everything. Just give me the monsters. Logical conclusions don’t satisfy. Monsters satisfy, absolutely.
Victor LaValle
Monsters almost always are culture's way of working out their fears.
Catherynne M. Valente
Monsters can live inside a person. Sometimes, they know about it. More often, they don’t. The monster makes them feel safe, or at the very least, better. As long as you know it’s there, you can co-exist with it. Give it what it wants, and it will return the favor. Other times, the monster takes over.Bares its teeth.
Nikki Rae
Monsters are very real. But they're not just creatures. Monsters are everywhere. They're people. They're nightmares...They are the things that we harbor within ourselves. If you remember one thing, even above remembering me, remember that there is not a monster dreamt that hasn't walked once within the soul of a man.
C. Robert Cargill
She was torn between the impulse to run and the urge to curl up like a pill bug, close her eyes, tuck her head beneath her arms, and play the game of since-I-can't-see-monsters-monsters-can't-see-me.
Holly Black
I pictured love as a big hairy giant with a dead fish in his mouth. Grizzly bear claws and his heart half out of his chest cause it’s too big and the lungs have to fit. He never stops walking. Over mountains. Through the desert. On top of icy lakes. Past huge cities. And he hunts and kills for you and always comes back with plenty to eat.
Adam Rapp
There are no monsters, Doctor,' she spluttered.Yeah, There are,' he said. 'Some of them are just better at hiding than others. And then there are the ones we wouldn't know if we saw them.
Steve Lyons
The less you knew, the fewer monsters you’d attract,
Rick Riordan
I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.
Teju Cole
I’d gone with my usual option. I was running through long tunnels filled with demons and monsters and nightmares, because it was easier than going to the gym.
Jim Butcher
Monster or not, he was risking his neck to save her.
Ilsa J Bick
To say that I wished I wasn't there would be a ludicrous understatement, but I'd only ever had the illusion of choice: We have to do this, Hank had said. It's for Ellis. To refuse would have been an act of calculated cruelty. And so, because of my husband's war with his father and their insane obsession with a mythical monster, we'd crossed the Atlantic at the very same time a real madman, a real monster, was attempting to take over the world for his own reasons of ego and pride.
Sara Gruen
It is a condition of monsters that they do not perceive themselves as such. The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry ‘Monster!’ and looked behind him
Laini Taylor
Monsters are born of pain, and grief, and loss, and anger. Your heart is full of them.--"And?"And it makes you vulnerable.
Jim Butcher
People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
On old maps, cartographers would draw strange beasts around the margins and write phrases such as "Here be dragons." That's where monsters exist: in the unmapped spaces, in the places where we haven't filled in all the gaps...
Kelly Link
It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes.Now it made sense – why monsters came out at night.
Joshua Gaylord
I welcome monsters into my bedand set a place for them at breakfast,leave sugar out for their coffeegoddamnI’ve always been so good at loving monsters
Fortesa Latifi
Monsters always make more trouble before they die.
Melinda Gebbie
The world is chock-full of monsters.
Rafael Yglesias
But such monsters as sphinxes bring forth the necessary heroes to defeat them, and because such heroes make civilization by the example of monster-taming, without the former there would be no civilization at all.
David D. Gilmore
Couldn’t we camp down by the lakes?” Nynaeve asked, patting her face with her kerchief. “It must be cooler down by the water.”“Light,” Mat said, “I’d just like to stick my head in one of them. I might never take it out.”Just then something roiled the waters of the nearest lake, the dark water phosphorescing as a huge body rolled beneath the surface. Length on man-thick length sent ripples spreading, rolling on and on until at last a tail rose, waving a point like a wasp’s stinger for an instant in the twilight, at least five spans into the air. All along that length fat tentacles writhed like monstrous worms, as many as a centipede’s legs. It slid slowly beneath the surface and was gone, only the fading ripples to say it had ever been.Rand closed his mouth and exchanged a look with Perrin. Perrin’s yellow eyes were as disbelieving as he knew his own must be. Nothing that big could live in a lake that size. Those couldn’t have been hands on those tentacles. They couldn’t have been.“On second thought,” Mat said faintly, “I like it right here just fine.
Robert Jordan
The power of monsters is their ability to fuse opposites, to merge contraries, to subvert rules, to overthrow cognitive barriers, moral distinction, and ontological categories. Monsters overcome the barrier of time itself. Uniting past and present, demonic and divine, guilt and conscience, predator and prey, parent and child, self and alien, our monsters are our innermost selves.
David D. Gilmore
She hated seeing monsters smile. Monsters should growl and snarl and be done with the pretenses.
Faith McKay
Good luck to you," he said, and she remembered how he had looked at her as she pinned Yah Tayyib, as if she was some kind of monster.Maybe she was.
Kameron Hurley
He was colossal (apparently they felt behemoth was easier to spell).
Emily Devenport
Not all monsters are filled with darkness.' She wanted him to understand this so badly that her voice trembled.He didn't even hesitate. 'This one is.'She allowed herself a moment to admire Tommy, the way he stood so resolute, like a knight charging after the monster. He just didn't get that this fight wasn't his to wage.'Exactly so,' she finally said.Of course Tommy would think she talking to him. He exhaled as though relieved and the start of a smile eased the tension around his lips. By the time he realized that she'd spoken the words to someone over his shoulder, it was already too late.
Carrie Ryan
Nobody ever thinks of himself as a villain, does he? Even monsters hold high opinions of themselves.
Victor LaValle
Nyx had killed a lot of people. She'd let even more die through neglect. Rhys was just one more. I'm the same person, aren't I? she thought. She had burned herself up, only to come out the other side exactly the same.Taite's signal would get out, Nyx knew. It would be soon enough to save *her*. But it would not be soon enough for Rhys. Nyx hardened her jaw. Her hands and feet were still tied. They'd stripped her of her most obvious weapons. She could just wait this out.She saw Rhys register that. But there was no shock. Just resignation. He knew her for what she was. Butcher. Monster.The same old monster.
Kameron Hurley
The sky grows dark over the city as Janey tells me her story. Teh beast was supposed to help their community. Something that would look good in a brochure, I suppose. But instead, it cut loose, took out in to the Williamsburg night. Janey and the kids went after it , and when they finally caught up what does it do? The thing ate a hipster.
Daniel José Older
I have learned it’s best to face down the trouble. Otherwise it will grow into a monster. We don’t have time for monsters.
Mark Andrew Poe
Who ever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.
James O'Barr
We often live next to monsters unawares.
Christopher Buehlman
I am a monster because I have too much of something.
Megan Shepherd
Monsters are most dangerous when they're afraid
Victoria Aveyard
It"s easier to believe there's a monster under the bed if you've spent the last six months arguing with a monster.
Chuck Klosterman
Every monster could be saved.
Shannon A. Thompson
The monsters in our valley were destroyed that day. Only a very few survived. But that was all right, because we didn't need monsters anymore. We had become them.
K.A. Applegate
The dragon, you know, hunkered in the village devouring maidens, heard the townsfolk cry 'Monster!' and looked behind him.
Laini Taylor
Let’s pretend it is a threat, because you need to understand that the other officers aren’t keeping me safe from you; they’re keeping you safe from me.
Laurell K. Hamilton
Broken people don't hide from their monsters. Broken people let themselves be eaten.
Francesca Zappia
There were two kinds of monsters, the kind that hunted the streets and the kind that lived in your head. She could fight the first, but the second was more dangerous. It was always, always, always a step ahead.
Victoria Schwab
Philip doesn't let go, his eyes glinting with rage. "We're gonna survive this thing,and we're gonna do it by being bigger monsters than they are! You understand? There ain't no philosophy, there ain't no grace, there ain't no mercy, there's only us and them, and all they wanna do is eat our ass! So we're gonna fucking eat them! We're gonna chew 'em up and spit 'em out, and we're gonna survive this thing or I will blow a hole through this whole fucked up world! You follow me? You FOLLOW ME!
Robert Kirkman
One of my roommates, Rafael, he's an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz
Unhappiness slowly creeps up on you, like a shape-shifting monster waiting in the darkness of your hallway, his bulging eyes watching your every move. The breath on his slimy tongue makes the hairs on your neck stand up.
Kate Rockland
Yes, my dear child, monsters are real. I happen to have one hanging in my basement.
Rick Yancey
Everyone carries around his own monsters.---Richard Pryor
Jonathan Maberry
All monsters must die except the beautiful ones
Cameron Jace
The Nephilim - the bogeyman for monsters, and all those who could be monsters.
Cassandra Clare
Remember that I’m still a monster. I can listen to you scream and cry and beg and I still won’t let you out.
Holly Black
Then stop trying to throw logic at nightmares. Sometimes the monsters are real, Anita. Sometimes they're real and the only way to defeat them is to be the bigger monster. ~Bibiana to Anita
Laurell K. Hamilton
Are you sure this isn't a nightmare? And that we won't just wake up?Yes.Because dreamers always wake up and leave their monsters behind.
Alexandra Bracken
Be careful in the company of monsters that you don't become one.
Cindy Gerard