Quotes from Brian Evenson

Truth cannot be imparted, it must be inflicted.

Caution: psychiatrists. There are hundreds of psychiatrists in this story, and each of them has a catchphrase they repeat over and over. Reading this story will make you hate psychiatrists, even if you are a psychiatrist.

We did speak, occasionally, but gestured more often than moved our lips, and in general lived in that brusque and silent accord enjoyed, if enjoyed is the right word, by certain long-married couples.

A person was more like an apple than a banana. You couldn't peel a person easily with your fingers. With a person, you needed a knife. With a person, like an apple, you could eat the skin.

Talking about one's stories is a little too much like nailing a dog to the floor -- you can get it to stay put that way but it doesn't do much for the dog.

Mr Kline," the voice said. "Would you mind putting Mlinko on?" "Mlinko seems to be dead," said Kline. "Appears or is?" "Both," said Kline

She was a whole girl made of two half girls, but wrongly made, of two of the same halves.

The strangeness of that: the feeling that you, or rather I, are at once dreaming and remembering and simultaneously doing something as if for the first time. That

I had some information and some noise, and needed only to determine what was information and what was noise, and then determine which parts of me I should ignore and which I should listen to.

And then he would tell me a story about a city that had come from another world, a city that was, in ways he either could not explain or which I could not understand, sentient. The beings in this city had once been like us.

In my worst moments, it seemed the state not only of me, but of the whole world, with all of us on the verge of turning around and finding the dead behind us... do your worst. Disrupt my certainty, try to fool me, make me believe. Get me to believe there is nothing dead behind me.

not that I was too out of breath, but that I was, as it were, too alive, living too many lives at once, as if I were breathing for many men. In retrospect, this realization seems far from cogent, simply another layer of ontological mystification, but at the time it seemed akin to revelation.

There is, in every event, whether lived or told, always a hole or a gap, often more than one. If we allow ourselves to get caught in it, we find it opening onto a void that, once we have slipped into it, we can never escape.

Truth cannot be imparted," said Kline. "It must be inflicted.

Anything can happen: anything. Or nothing. Who can say? The world, monstrous, is made that way, and in the end consumes us all. Who am I, administrated or no, to have the audacity to survive it?

Curiosity is a terrible thing, he was thinking. How is it possible to stop oneself from needing to know?

I don't think that writing, real writing, has much to do with affirming belief--if anything it causes rifts and gaps in belief which make belief more complex and more textured, more real. Good writing unsettles, destroys both the author and the reader. From my perspective, there always has to be a tension between the writer and the monolithic elements of the culture, such as religion.

But I opened up each pale eye within me and inquired until I found enough to tell me to rummage some more, and then I tried to close all the eyes again at once, to seal each back—for their own good, for their safety. Each was already crisscrossed with darkness and scars and damage, and awakening them seemed only to damage them worse, so better to keep them asleep.

That's Kline," he said. "We know and love him. He's like a person to us.

There has, I fear, developed the worst of needs, the need to know, coupled reluctantly with an awareness that I probably will, in fact, never know.

They drove, the city slowly dissolving around them and breaking up into fields and trees.

Every time you think you have the world figured, trust me, that's just when the world's got you figured and is about to spring and break your back

The world is a strange place , thought Haupt, alone in the dark, almost unbearably so. And yet, it is the only place I have. And I'm not even entirely sure I have it.

But this is not that kind of story, the kind meant to explain things. It simply tells things as they are, and as you know there is no explanation for how things are, at least none that would make any difference and allow them to be something else.