Quotes from Chris Adrian

I want to be a good creature for reasons beyond sharing a life with a good man.

I am...sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.

It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.

If there's a magic pony in the story, chances are I'll read it.

If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder. "I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.

But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.

The knowledge of my depravity is the only thing that makes me special... that I have always always always known, and have never for a moment been able to forget, that there is something terribly wrong with me.

I used to feel sorry for them, or sad. Not so much any more. Now I wonder what they did, and I know what they did, and all I can think is how all that water is barely enough to cover it up.

I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun.

I am...sad and angry. I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.

I shall not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.

He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various , that lined the shelves.

He never got a really proper look at them, but the situation told him it must be a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck.

I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she'd gone.

He liked to think that he tolerated more strangeness than most people, because he knew from experience that life was generally much stranger than most folks could imagine.

It was something he would figure out only after Bobby dumped him: that his imagination was what made the real world, and real people, only barely palatable for him.

Maybe I'm too crazy to be in a relationship," Henry said, which was his familiar response to Bobby's familiar discourse about the future. It felt like a grown-up thing to say, and like a difficult concession, and what he meant by it was I am trying as hard as I can and it's not enough for you or even Why can't my weak eccentricities be adorable to you, as yours are to me? But Bobby always heard it as a conversation stopper, childish and easy and glib.

We are so lucky to live here," he would say, and she couldn't disagree. They were lucky that the earth had conspired to heap up such startling beauty in one place, and they were lucky that it hadn't all fallen apart yet in a a geological catastrophe.

They had been quarrelling for as long as they had been in love.

The difference, she decided, was that now there was something to be done. Hell would be raised, and Oberon would come or not, but at least there would be no more idle tears. The night would end in joy or ruin, and somehow that was easier to abide than an endless, static grief.

Maybe, she thought, the reign of malicious sarcasm was over and she could be a good person again.

What she had done over the past year had required an equivalent expenditure of energy to a year-long sprint, and when she thought of it that way it was obviously an unreasonable thing to do. Remaining sane--clinging and grasping at it, seeking to please a propriety constructed by people whose boyfriends had never killed themselves--was in fact the most insane thing she could have done, and anyone properly equipped by the right kind of experience would understand that.

She had spent the majority of her days in some sort of a tizzy and had developed over the course of her life a tizzy repertoire of abundant variety, from the black depressive tizzy to the anxious weepy tizzy to the more traditional furious tizzy, which almost always involved projectiles.

She might do what the mortals did, and strain to convince herself that the death of her Boy and the loss of her husband had happened for some reason, that some restitution would be made for her, that she would be paid for her suffering with a truer and more tolerable understanding of the world, but she didn't think she had the muscles for it.