Alistair Cross Quotes

I think it's important to present yourself as a professional. While writing a good book is critical, nothing will cancel that out faster than behaving like an amateur. I cringe every time I see an author arguing with a reader who left a poor review, or fighting with their friends on Facebook … or publicly bashing their agents or publishers. ~ Alistair Cross

I've loved Anne Rice's books all my life and being able to talk with her was surreal. It was the only time I've ever been truly starstruck. ~ Alistair Cross

I enjoy reading for the sake of reading and my attitude about writing is the same. If a story line required it, I would absolutely write in another genre. ~ Alistair Cross

My big dream was to write. I never thought about movie deals or book awards or bestseller lists. I still don't. All I've ever wanted from this gig is to sell enough books to allow me to keep writing more of them. ~ Alistair Cross

I have a file in my phone that I'm always adding things to. People accuse me of texting too much but nine times out of ten, I'm not texting anyone. I'm recording ideas. ~ Alistair Cross

Good horror is written by people who understand that fear is one of the cardinal passageways into the core of humanity. Good horror is generally written by folks who grew up on horror; books, movies, etc. You can't simply decide to write - in any genre - if you don't first have an understanding of the topic and a strong mental backlog of reference. ~ Alistair Cross

Deadlines help me, but my muse hates them. My muse functions in fits and starts, and tends to take very long vacations. Deadlines are like a hot poker to his ass. They force us both to sit down and write, which is what it takes to do this. ~ Alistair Cross

The black panic, that's what woke me; that all too familiar blend of terror and heinousness that buzzed beneath my skin where no eye could detect it and no scalpel could dig it out, where it would remain until I exorcised it out of me. Last night's memories were making their entrance. ~ Alistair Cross

If I've learned anything in this life, it's that dreams do not simply "come" true. Dreams are given slow, painful birth to after hours, days, weeks, months, and years of very hard labor. ~ Alistair Cross

Any writer of horror needs to at least have a good, solid love of the genre. Also, good horror writers need to have a slightly twisted sense of humor. Without humor, horror just isn't as good. ~ Alistair Cross

I watched her sip at the drink some more. She was strong, healthy, but also petite enough that I was certain I could overpower her. I'd made the right decision not to tranquilize her, I thought. Slipping some powerful barbiturate into a mixed drink wasn't something I was above, but it always felt like such a lost opportunity. I liked the fight, the tightening and clenching of a woman's body as she writhed for freedom. I felt the slow swelling of arousal between my legs and made no effort to disguise it. ~ Alistair Cross

Her face was a grimace of surprised pain as she slid unconscious down the back of the tub and under the water.
I held her under for several minutes after the blow, watching as the water went pink, then red, and finally crimson with blood. ~ Alistair Cross

Yep," I said, rolling the body onto its back and staring into the horrified, bloated face, "you're a single-bagger. My kinda gal." I gave her a smile and a friendly wink. The face stared back at me with that same frozen look of terror. "Oh, stop being so dramatic," I said, "You'll be pretty again, I promise. ~ Alistair Cross

I firmly believe that writers must take full accountability for their careers. It's a business, and part of business is marketing. You wouldn't slap an OPEN sign on the window of your new barber shop, go home, and wait for the money to start rolling in. ~ Alistair Cross

I think horror, when done well, is one of the most direct and honest ways to get to the core of the human experience because terror reduces all of us to our most authentic forms. ~ Alistair Cross

I remember writing all kinds of stories as a kid, but I really don't know what the first thing was. Whatever it was, I'm certain it was bloody and twisted, though, and probably involved talking cats. ~ Alistair Cross

They want to be stimulated. They want to read something that can get under their skin and hang out there for a while. ~ Alistair Cross

If you are really spontaneous, people will think you are mad. If you go to a tree and start talking, or to a flower, people will think you are mad. If you go to a church and talk to a cross or to an image, nobody will think your are mad, they will think that you are religious. You are talking to a stone in a temple and everybody thinks you are religious because this is the authorized form. ~ Rajneesh

When one takes into account also His reiterated assertions about His Divinity - such as asking us to love Him above parents, to believe in Him even in the face of persecution, to be ready to sacrifice our bodies in order to save our souls in union with Him - to call Him just a good man ignores the facts. No man is good unless he is humble; and humility is a recognition of truth concerning oneself. A man who thinks he is greater than he actually is is not humble, but a vain and boastful fool. How can any man claim prerogatives over conscience, and over history, and over society and the world and still claim he is 'meek and humble of heart'? But if He is God as well as man, His language falls into place and everything that He says is intelligible. But if He is not what He claimed to be, then some of His most precious sayings are nothing but bombastic outburts of self-adulation that breathe rather the spirit of Lucifer than the spirit of a good man. What avails Him to proclam the law of self-renouncement, if He Himself renounces truth to call Himself God? Even His sacrifice on the Cross becomes a suspect and dated thing, when it goes hand in hand with delusions of grandeur and infernal conceit. He could not be called even a sincere teacher, for no sincere teacher would allow anyone to construe his claims to share the rank and the name of the Great God in heaven. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

Santi was a behemoth in the art world, and being known solely by one's first name was a level of fame achieved only by an elite few... people like Napoleon, Galileo, and Jesus... and, of course, the demigods Langdon now heard blaring from Harvard dormitories - Sting, Madonna, Jewel, and the artist formerly known as Prince, who had changed his name to the symbol ?, causing Langdon to dub him 'The Tau Cross With Intersecting Hermaphroditic Ankh. ~ Dan Brown

It's normally agreed that the question "How are you?" doesn't put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, "A bit early to say." (If it's the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, "I seem to have cancer today.") Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of "life" when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut–wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask... It's no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don't have a body, I am a body. But it's not really possible to adopt a stance of "Don't ask, don't tell," either. Like its original, this is a prescription for hypocrisy and double standards. Friends and relatives, obviously, don't really have the option of not making kind inquiries. One way of trying to put them at their ease is to be as candid as possible and not to adopt any sort of euphemism or denial. The swiftest way of doing this is to note that the thin ~ Christopher Hitchens

The keys to America: The cross, the brew, the dollar, and the gun. ~ George Carlin

Indeed, it is amazing that a religion was founded on the experience of utter shame, of a god that dies the death of a condemned criminal. ~ Vitor Westhelle

Now, the more holy a man gets the more he cries in this fashion. While he is low down in the scale, he puts up with sin, and he is uneasy, but when he gets to see Christ and get somewhat like him, the more nearly he approximates to the image of his Master, the more the presence of the least sinful thought is horrifying to him. He would, if he could, never look on sin again - never have the slightest inclination to it, but he finds his heart getting abroad and wandering when he would tether it down, if he could, to the cross and crucify it there. ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. "What do we do with this?"
Dag sat cross-legged and smiled
not much of a smile, but a start. "Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It's very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever. ~ Lois McMaster Bujold

If you cross a pickle with a female deer ... You get a dill-doe! ~ Ashley Purdy

If you lose an opportunity you will be like one who lets the bird fly away; you will never get it back. ~ John Of The Cross

Weapons of mass destruction violate more than individual lives - they cross international borders and jeopardize all people. They also drain resources that could be used instead for medicines, schools and other life-saving supplies. We must come together with even greater determination to prevent a WMD nightmare. ~ Ban Ki-moon

Gifts are free. If you work for a gift, it is no longer a gift. Gifts in the truest sense are undeserved. If we feel we deserve it, then it ceases to be a gift and becomes an award. The eternal life God gives us is truly a gift because we don't deserve it in any way. ~ John R. Cross

I train very hard, either rowing on the cross trainer or running. Not only do you feel tired afterwards but it relaxes you, it completely clears the head. But to sort things out I also like to walk. ~ Barry McGuigan

As soon as you cross your property line, you might as well write off the possibility of getting anything else done that day. ~ Mark Frauenfelder

The cross is the place where, and the means by which, God loved us to the uttermost. ~ N. T. Wright

Two shadowy figures had appeared in the distance. A young girl led a donkey by its halter, chattering to a child perched on its swaying back. What in God's name were they doing out alone at night? They headed down the dirt road straight toward the house where Tehrazzi was apparently holed up. Every muscle in her body went rigid with denial. "Oh no ... " Had Dec heard the kids? Did he know they were in danger? Could he alert the children before the air strike? Not if he hadn't seen them. What should she do? She was too afraid to yell out in case someone started shooting, but no way could she sit back and let those children suffer. The breath shot in and out of her nose as she counted backward from ten, praying Dec would do something so she wouldn't have to. Ten, nine, eight ... The little boy laughed. Bryn squeezed her eyes ~ Kaylea Cross

On the other side of that line was freedom - the kind of freedom that can never be taken away from you. It was freedom from our self-imposed limitations. Although through our training we have grown to believe that running 52 consecutive miles was possible, none of us really believed in our heart of hearts that it was probable. As individuals, each of us struggled with their own fear and self-doubt. But the moment we cross that finish line, we have given ourselves the gift of freedom from our fears, our self-doubt, and our self-imposed limitations. ~ Hal Elrod

The greatest bridge you can cross in life is the one that leads to your destiny. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

You cannot cross the narrow bridge of art carrying all its tools in your hands. Some you must leave behind ... ~ Virginia Woolf

Our Nation's immigration laws are disrespected both by those who cross our borders illegally and by the businesses that hire those illegal immigrants. ~ Steve Israel

To reconcile, that is what the forest does, silent and accepting, as if God were present therein, taking the grief unto Himself. When humans no longer think themselves alone, masters of all they survey, when they discern the humility of their place in the vastness of God's creation, then that creation and its God can share the pain. For the Christians, the Cross symbolized that reality; confronted with it, the human is not freed of grief, but he is no longer alone to bear it. It is taken up, shared. ~ Erazim V. Kohák

Just put a little pin in your mind: when you cross 50 employees, there are a new set of HR rules that you have to comply with. ~ Sam Altman

The measure of all love is its giving. The measure of the love of God is the cross of Christ. ~ J.I. Packer

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it all the rest are not only useless but disastrous. ~ Thomas Merton

Everywhere and continually it is in your power to be reverently content with your present circumstance, to behave to men who are present with you according to right and to handle skillfully the present impression, that nothing you have not mastered may cross the threshold of the mind. ~ Marcus Aurelius

I heard one time that the Superman glyph is the second or third most recognizable symbol on Earth after the Christian cross. ~ Zack Snyder

To know the Cross is not merely to know our own sufferings. For the Cross is the sign of salvation, and no man is saved by his own sufferings. To know the Cross is to know that we are saved by the sufferings of Christ; more, it is to know the love of Christ Who underwent suffering and death in order to save us. It is, then, to know Christ. ~ Thomas Merton

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. ~ Virginia Woolf

And yet it was principally by means of those sufferings, that he conquered and overthrew his enemies. Christ never so effectually bruised Satan's head, as when he bruised his heel. The weapon with which Christ warred against the devil, and obtained a most complete victory and glorious triumph over him, was the cross, the instrument and weapon with which he thought he had overthrown Christ, and brought on him shameful destruction. ~ Jonathan Edwards

While the new Legionnaire man eliminated his enemies in the name of God, with a cross in his hand, the new Communist man eliminated God altogether and stood on His pedestal. They were both equally thirsty for blood. ~ Teodor Flonta

Burr had the dark and severe coloring of his Edwards ancestry, with black hair receding from the forehead and dark brown, almost black, eyes that suggested a cross between an eagle and a raven. Hamilton had a light peaches and cream complexion with violet-blue eyes and auburn-red hair, all of which came together to suggest an animated beam of light to Burr's somewhat stationary shadow. ~ Joseph J. Ellis

You going to let me go now?"
"That depends." He muttered. "Are you going to try and nosedive down the stairs again?"
"Wasn't planning on it, but who knows how this might play out. ~ Violet Cross