Lauren Beukes Quotes

Fear makes you ugly.

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.

You'd think I would know better than to get involved with someone in my own department. But I'm really crap at resisting sexual tension. Oh, it's entertaining for a few weeks, the fuzzy sting that rushes down your vertebra to your groin when the eyes meet, the banter spiked with innuendo - then it becomes irritating, and you need to get it out of your system. Neutralize it by indulging it, which is fine, assuming you can both keep it tidy.

He always thought a muse should be sex on legs.

Affectionate violence. For when a hug just won't do. That's a Hallmark card for you.

Always thought being a writer would be one of the most useless things you could be in a zombie apocalypse, but it turns out arts and culture and storytelling is what helps us get through. Along with science, doctors, nurses, delivery people, farm workers and supermarket cashiers.

Can't reinvent the wheel. But you can put your own spin on it.

The problem with chemistry is that it tends to blow things up. And she is already a chain of reactions building up inside.

If you want to kiss me again, then shut the fuck up and stop bleeding to death

This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can't chew your way out of.

I think Canada probably has an embargo on dicks." "That's why they're so nice. No dicks allowed.

You can bury your radical magazines and tear up your sexually perverse sketches and burn your sheets. But how do you erase who you are?

Poison shared is poison halved. Or maybe it just poisons everyone equally.

Fresh starts don't come with expired relationships attached

Time heals. Crushes let up. Splinters work their way out. Doesn't mean they don't leave scars that itch.

Like Humpty Dumpty. At some point you have to pick up the pieces. Or walk away. Don't look back. Fuck the king's horses.

It doesn't escape him that the rock holding it up is the perfect fit for his fist. Or how easily one of those needle spokes would slide right through the girl's eye like Jell-O.

It's hard to get justice in the real world. It's possible in fiction.

Next time, can you ask him to bring cookies? I don't like to put up with that level of insane unless there's some kind of high-calorie compensation.

This is the way the world is now. Everything is public. You have to find other people who understand.

World needs more angels, even plywood ones.

Oh, but fine isn't everything!' Rachel exclaims and grabs her hands and pulls her into a stepping foxtrot over the paintings, twirling her round. 'Fine is the very definition of mediocrity. It's what's polite. It's what's socially acceptable. We need to live brighter and deeper than just fine, my darling!

in his memory, Instagrams really, because

Good manners will do that; turn a situation around. You got to treat people like people.

The problem is he didn't just burn his bridges when he left New York, he blew them up and napalmed the river.

Finish the damn book. Nothing else matters. Stop second guessing yourself and write it through to the end. You don't know what you have until you've finished it. You don't know how to fix it until it's all down on the page.

Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting

Fear festers in the imagination. It's not fear's fault. That's just the way it's made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb.

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to invent the news.

We do this to ourselves. Society is a poisonous hamster wheel.

No one said it would be pretty, yanking despair out of a woman.

I did a lot of research on real serial killers, and they're not Hannibal Lecters. They're cruel men who are given the opportunity to do something terrible, and a lot of the time it's about impotence. They feel powerless in the real world.

There is aerated ink caked in the air vents from the printing presses that shake the whole building when they run. Some reporters have ink in their veins. The Sun-Times staff have ink in their lungs. Once in a while someone will complain to OSHA.

I'd rather be a happy Hooters waitress than a depressed out-of-work actor.

Traffic in Joburg is like the democratic process. Every time you think it's going to get moving and take you somewhere, you hit another jam.

Everyone is broken.

That's all you got? 'The people'? Fuck you." He blinks. "Isn't there supposed to be a good cop?" "We're short staffed.

Nervousness hates a vacuum. 826 alligator. Nervousness will blurt right out with something, anything, to kill the silence. 839 alligator. Unless nervousness is kept busy doing something more useful. Like counting. 842 alligator.

A gut wound will drop a man in his tracks every time. Harper always found it more personal than bullets, getting right up into someone. It made the war bearable.

With the amount of sugar I'm doing, she's lucky I can remember the colour of my eyes without a mirror.

Six foot eight and all asshole.

Hell isn't other people, it's other parents.

That's what I thought" he said. "It doesn't change anything, Zinzi". He moved to kiss me, but as I tilted my head up, he pressed the mango against my lips instead. "Idiot" I said, wiping my mouth, mainly to hide my smile. "Adulterer", he grinned. "Unwitting accomplice!" "You weren't so unwitting last night. And besides polygamie is legal in Congo." "Did I call you an idiot already?" "Only as much as I deserve." This time he did kiss me. I handed over twelve bucks for the mango and tucked myself under his arm, forcing Sloth to shuffle over begrudgingly. "Are we a terrible cliché?" "Isn't everybody?" he said.

I smile thinly, to make it clear that this will happen when hell turns into a family friendly summer resort.

What I love about collaborating is that you're working with other minds that work differently to yours.

You have to do the cutting yourself, to let out the pain inside. Getting someone else to slice you up is cheating.

She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams

Shakespeare would have it wrong these days. It's not the world that's the stage - it's social media, where you're trying to put on a show. The rest of your life is rehearsals, prepping in the wings to be fabulous online.

The future is not as loud as war, but it is relentless. It has a terrible fury all its own.

There are only so many plots in the world. It's how they unfold that makes them interesting.

The biggest fairy tale is that justice works because it doesn't.

Life lesson: looks plus don't-give-a-fuck confidence mean you can have anything you want - any

( ... ) everything is finite. Life. Love. All this.' ( ... ) 'Sadness too. Although that's harder to let go of than happiness.

Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.

The dream knows what they are waiting for, even if they don't themselves.
The end of everything.
The moment when it reveals its miracle boy and all the eyes will look and their seeing will be horror and glory and wonder and it will pierce the skin of the world, collapse dimensions, and open the doors and the work will breathe and dance in his shoes and the dream will be able to escape.

WWCD. What would George Clooney do?

I hate golf. It's the genteel version of seal-clubbing, only not as much fun.

Twitter is amazing. I advertised for the position of research assistant on Twitter, and both of my researchers came from there.

Shining stars linked together through time. A constellation of murder.

Fashion is only different skins for different flavours of you.

Anyone can find they've been standing on the trapdoor when they thought they were the spotlight attraction.

Only other people can make you feel real.

Don't get too close buddy ' I warn Sloth. Unofficially there's a code of conduct but animals are still animals. And animals can be assholes too.

Florrie smiles with unmoderated joy, because she can't see that most people bank their happiness like it's something you might run out of

A yellow dog barks at him from behind a chain-link fence, all possessive ferocity and no damn balls. Just like the gang-banger kids. They think a pistol equals cojones. That's why they tuck them into their pants.

Sometime I think I'd like to torture him to death. Other times, I think I'd forgive him. Because that would be worse.

You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homicide board tracking the killer's movements. But the connections get thicker and denser and more complicated all the time.

Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.