01c. 1964 ADAnd it means snapshots, because that's what all stories I write come down to; each is a snapshot of who I was during however many days and weeks it was written. A fictional reflection of my mind fossilized, set in paper and ink, instead of stone. Memorialized, for better or worse. This is who I was, and this, and this, and this, and that, and most times I look back and wince. I'm rarely kind to who I was. But other times, looking back is bittersweet. Sometimes, I'm even grateful to the me of then who left a snapshot for the me of now. Maybe I should let go and join those who pretend the past is past, but it's a falsehood I've never learned to spin.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
03c. 1964 ADYou know, it's a sad and unfortunate state of affairs that you have to live in a world where eight-year-olds refuse to believe in anything that they cannot touch or measure, and anyone who happens to see a thing that is invisible to most people is immediately branded a lunatic.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
04c. 1964 ADIt is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over."Houses Under The SeaCaitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
05c. 1964 ADYou think one's any different from the next? I mean, when it comes right down to brass tacks, people killing each other since they figured out how, that's all. Give them pretty names and numbers, but it's all the same to the worms.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
06c. 1964 ADThat would be showing him a part of her soul, a part of her mind, that she's never risked showing anyone. The raw and squirming part that indifferent high-school counselor were always prying at, the part therapists tried to trick her into showing them for free, the part her parents hated her for. The light and the darkness behind her eyes. The soft places.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
07c. 1964 ADI think I might have something for you today," he says, reaches beneath the counter, and his hand comes back with a book, clothbound cover the color of antique ivory, title and author stamped in faded gold and art deco letters. Best Ghost Stories by Algernon Blackwood, and she lifts it carefully off the countertop, picks it up the way someone else might lift a diamond necklace or a sick kitten, and opens the book to the frontispiece and title page, black-and-white photo of the author in a dapper suit, sadkind eyes and his bow tie just a little crooked.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
08c. 1964 ADI loved this place when I was a kid. I still love it, but when I was a kid I'd take the bus down here and spend all day long reading in this room.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
09c. 1964 ADI don't like remembering the way that hurt her. Hurts her. I'm sure it still does; I'm just not around to see, and I don't like dwelling on that, either. That's only normal. Missing people you still love, and not wanting to see them in pain and angry and humiliated.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
10c. 1964 ADDancy closes her eyes, remembering all the times that have been so much worse than this, all the horror and shame and sorrow to give her strength. The burning parts of her no one and nothing can ever touch, the fire where her soul used to be.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
11c. 1964 ADListen: Love your fiction, even if you hate the act of creating that fiction, love the stories to a fault. Cry at your tragedies, laugh at your jokes, rejoice at your character's victories — or give it all up and go knit a damned sweater, instead.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
12c. 1964 ADOriginality is the most deadly mirage in all of art. You can chase it from now until doomsday, and you'll only find yourself lost and dying of thirst.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
13c. 1964 ADIn the end, it's only a story of having had her words and secrets, her confidences, turned against her by someone she once believed entirely beyond any acts of betrayal. A story of pettiness and cruelty and of the lies friends will tell when a friendship has ceased to be profitable or convenient. It is a very simple and inexpressibly complex story of cowardice...Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
14c. 1964 ADI began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
15c. 1964 ADAfter Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
16c. 1964 ADAssassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
17c. 1964 ADMaking a story from the messy thoughts and half-thoughts in her head, building a world and lives and taking them apart again, fitting the pieces together another way until it feels right, as right as she can make it feel.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
18c. 1964 ADYou could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
19c. 1964 ADThat's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
20c. 1964 ADA phenomenon that might seem only backwards or silly when expressed at a social level becomes madness at the individual level.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
21c. 1964 ADI began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of "sane" people. I don't. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
22c. 1964 ADTime is your cathedral. You know the present is only a pretty illusion in the minds of men. And I think you know that nothing has ever passed away, not entirely.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
23c. 1964 ADI could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
24c. 1964 ADDemons never die quietly, and a week ago the storm was a proper demon, sweeping through the Caribbean after her long ocean crossing from Africa, a category five when she finally came ashore at San Juan before moving on to Santo Domingo and then Cuba and Florida. But now she's grown very old, as her kind measures age, and these are her death throes. So she holds tightly to this night, hanging on with the desperate fury of any dying thing, any dying thing that might once have thought itself invincible.Caitlín R. Kiernan / quote ↗
