Jack Ketchum Quotes

But I figure passion's like the wind in the trees out there. Blows hard for a while and feels strong and clean while it's blowing and maybe it even blows so long and hard that you start living with it. It feels like the wind's a part of you, like it's essential, if you know what I mean, something you can hardly imagine life without. But it's got to pass. So you can get on with things without all the confusion of that wind in your hair.

We were just kids. We were property. We belonged to our parents, body and soul. It meant we were doomed in the face of any real danger from the adult world and that meant hopelessness, and humiliation and anger.

Black coffee's a lot like whiskey, you know? All devil and no trimmin's. Always liked my sins pure and take it as it comes.

You tell me why's a man's blood is any better or any more precious than a dog's blood? It sure ain't to the dog.

I have always felt a fundamental core of loneliness in me. Perhaps it comes from being an only child. Perhaps it's my grandfather's sullen thick German blood. I have been alone with my wife and alone with my children, untouchable, unreachable, and I suspect that most of the time they haven't known. It runs deep, this aloneness. I have accommodated it. It informs all my relationships and all my expectations. It makes me almost impossible to surprise by life's grimmer turns of fate.

To her eyes, used to diversity, there was a troubling uniformity about them all, something that spoke of isolation, and a dull and thoughtless cruelty.

Betty Knot was sitting on the porch now with her old mongrel dog. Both of them fast and peacefully asleep in the shade, almost comically so, the widow leaning in her rocker with her mouth open wide and the old dog sprawled at her feet. And seeing them there made him smile and then unexpectedly saddened him with a sudden forceful clarity. It was as though he had looked behind the scene on the porch across the street into some terrible scene in the future. Because they each were all the other had in the world by way of comfort and it was possible for him to understand in that moment the cruel eventuality that was blooming there. They were both so damn old. He sensed a sort of fate about them and sensed too that it would descend upon them soon, that soon either the woman would lose the dog or the dog would lose the woman and they had been together since the dog was a pup. When death came to one the other would be left alone, no familiar hand to pat the dog or cool wet nose to nuzzle the hand, and there would be no consoling either dog or woman, something fragile lost forever in some awful rending.

pain can work form the outside in.

Sympathy can turn so quickly. Just add fear. Stir.

Crayfish," I said. I dumped out a tin of water. "Really?" I nodded. "Big ones?" "Not these. You can find them, though." "Can I see?" She dropped down off the bank just like a boy would, not sitting first, just putting her left hand to the ground and vaulting the three-foot drop to the first big stone in the line that led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment and then crossed to the Rock. I was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I made room for her. There was suddenly this fine clean smell sitting next to me. Her eyes were green. She looked around. To all of us back then the Rock was something special. It sat smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and fast around it.

I lay in bed and thought about how easy it was to hurt a person. It didn't have to be physical. All you had to do was take a good hard kick at something they cared about.

But there's also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They're not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don't have to give it to 'em. They're not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah's opine du jour. They're questers.
They know that every now and then you're gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub's Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you're gonna have to get your hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want - to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that's really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.
If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better.

can. "New York City, huh?" "Yup." She rolled up her sleeves and dipped down into the water. And that was when I noticed the scar. "Jeez. What's that?" It started just inside her left elbow and ran down to the wrist like a long pink twisted worm. She saw where I was looking. "Accident," she said. "We were in a car." Then she looked back into the water where you could see her reflection shimmering. "Jeez." But then she didn't seem to want to talk much after that. "Got any more of 'em?" I don't know why scars are always so fascinating to boys, but they are, it's a fact of life, and I just couldn't help it. I couldn't shut up about it yet. Even though I knew she wanted me to, even though

Someone once said to me that if you want to make God laugh, just tell him your plans. Just tell him who you are.

The dialogue is solo now. I don't talk. No matter who's in bed with me I never do. My thoughts slip off into nightmares sometimes but I don't share them. I have become now what I only began to be then - completely self-protective.

Bar life is about as democratic as we get.

Friendship and sex were really all she wanted from men these days.

In the basement, with Ruth, I began to learn that anger, hate, fear and loneliness are all one button awaiting the touch of just a single finger to set them blazing toward destruction.