Quotes from Lucius Shepard

If you deny mystery-even in the guise of death-then you deny life, and you will walk like a ghost through your days, never knowing the secrets of the extremes. The deep sorrows, the absolute joys.

The effort mined a core of dizziness inside him. He resisted it, but then realizing that there was nothing attractive about consciousness, nothing he cared to know about the someone in charge of death and butterflies, he let himself go spiraling down past layers of darkness and shining wings, darkness and mystical light, and a memory of pain so bright that it became a white darkness wherein he lost all track of being.

The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell.

Don't you see the inevitability of this moment? I mean we're talking serious process here, man. The perfect critic stepping forth from the demimonde of the war and blowing the heart of the painting to rubble, and then turning his weapon on the man whose actions have been the pure contrary of the work's formal imperative.' 'I'm outta film,' said the mestizo cameraman.

Even the serenity he felt was something that needed to be understood; it seemed a symptom of a deeper and more complete understanding that lay yet beyond him.

from that day forward she lived happily ever after. Except for the dying at the end. And the heartbreak in between.

Then how come you went there?" "I was lonesome. Lonesome takes what it can get.