Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.

Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.

All too infrequently do I encounter a new voice as delightful, compelling, and intelligent as that of Molly Tanzer.

Normal is a bitter pill that we rail against.

Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.

I need a world filled with wonder, with awe, with awful things. I couldn't exist in a world devoid of marvels, even if the marvels are terrible marvels. Even if they frighten me to consider them.

Art should never be a slave to commerce, but for all working artists that's exactly what it must be.

Every month, the US is spending more on the Iraqi war than it took to reach Saturn and Titan. Mass murder is expensive, and good science is relatively cheap.

Magick may be no more than the willful invocation of awe.

The writing of a novel or short story or poem or whatever should elevate the audience, not drag the writer down to some level beneath herself. And she - the author - should fight always to prevent that dragging down, especially when the only possible benefit of allowing it to happen is monetary.

Originality 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.

No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man will poke out his eye to fit in.

A book may only be judged for what it is, not what you'd like it to be.

Assassination is almost always unthinkable to moral, thinking men until after a holocaust has come and gone.

You 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.