Quotes from Chet Williamson

Publishers love to compartmentalize, and Second Chance was not an easy novel to define.

he found nothing but a matchbook from a motel in Liberal, Kansas.

In Europe it was once commonly believed that beasts could be possessed by demons and controlled by the evil of Satan. So animals, even birds and insects, were tried by ecclesiastical courts, just like witches and heretics. They were excommunicated, tortured and condemned to death.

Unlike the Indians, who gathered branches for firewood, the first white settlers girdled the trees to clear the land. And the great forest began to dwindle. As they would everywhere they went, the settlers used up the land to the point where they couldn't grow enough food.

GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear. —Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Say, Jordie, how much did you drink?" Josh asked, adding the deputy's warning. "Fuck 'im," Jordie grinned, pulled an empty pint bottle from the deep leg pocket of his baggy pants, let it fall to the floor. He giggled, pulling another empty pint from the other leg pocket, also empty. He frowned momentarily, then reached into his Jacket pocket and produced a third battle, three-quarters full.

She reached for the Dr. Pepper and put it in with the Pepsi.

Allah is always merciful to men. It must be that he knows men are not as strong as women.

Being seen through, with wisdom and detachment. And being found, not to have a big booger hanging out of his nose, but to be of some mysterious value.

It's just an idea. There's no harm in ideas." "I ain't so sure of that," said Eddie Karl. "That Hitler had ideas.

We are all creatures of myth, shadowed by archaic images of life and death.

Honest to Jeez, Loafer, if your skin got any thinner, your guts'd pop out and dance a hula.

Gasm was one of the first to put a warning label on their record." Lucas saw the sticker on the shrink-wrap of Pain Threshold. WARNING! This record contains music that has been SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN to pollute your precious bodily fluids, grow hair on your hands, kill your goldfish, and cause mass starvation in the Third World. If you subject yourself to this music, your soul will fry in hell forever, world without end, PLAY IT LOUD!!!

People are trying to get in?" "Sure. Just like that guy on the train. Curiosity seekers, freelance writers, photographers. It's amazing. It's barely been a day, Alice, and already the ghouls are descending. I figure by tomorrow someone'll be selling T-shirts and souvenir beer mugs.

Marie Snyder's dead, and here you are laughin' about it." "We're all gonna be dead sooner or later," Eddie said. "Maybe it ain't funny, but it ain't no great tragedy neither.

A carillon was pealing as they cruised soundlessly over a watercourse and through bowers; they were splashed in passing by hot droplets of sun.

On his good days he was eerie. He could make the rest of the human race feel obsolete. —Mrs. Roberta P. Edge

If there were a ruin associated with Vlad Dracula near Oradea, the Rumanian Tourist Bureau would have been exploiting it already. Then he found a notation in an archeological guide that near the border—near Oradea but in Transylvania—was a site designated by the Rumanian government as a historical edifice not open to tourists. The exact words, expressed with the unintentional humor so characteristic of communist bureaucracies, were that the site was an "unauthorized ruin.

Self-interest is the only constant in life, and murder is always preferred to impotence. —Childermass

History is a record of destruction. One must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal.

the crows grew fat on the remains of both our armies. Empires rise and fall, and the only true victors are the birds.

What was the joke the paratroops used in jump school? It's not the fall that kills you, it's the sudden stop.

So what's been happening to you?" his friend asked. "You have insomnia, you're off your feed, and you couldn't get it up a couple of times. So what?" He shook his head, laughing again. "I really don't think that if you went to a doctor and described those symptoms, he would shake his head and say"—and Jerry's voice shifted into a very bad imitation of Bela Lugosi's—" 'We are dealing here with the curse of the Undead!

What the hell were you up to?" Jordie waited for the voice to give him instructions, tell him what to do or say, but the voice was gone. He looked the deputy sheriff in the face and grinned. "I was just gonna kill 'em, is all.