Bick Quotes

We were like matching bookends, almost touching but with volumes between us and stories, so many stories. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Tell yourself you're dead, the way Matt does, so the past can't hurt you. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

What about study hall? Shouldn't I go to the library?
"What for, Ms. Lord?" Mr. anderson said. "You're with me ~ Ilsa J. Bick

No one can help but stare at the monster, because horror is a cousin to awe. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Obeying orders just to obey is the mark of a person who has ceased to think. Remember, it is better to suffer for doing what is right rather than for doing what is wrong. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Neither was evil. They were both true to who they are. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

I think. I sense. I wonder. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Follow your heart. Just don't get lost. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

I didn't throw the paper away.
Maybe I should have.
Oh, the things you know in retrospect. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

But sticking to rules just because they're there does not make them right. You need to learn when the rules should be broken. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Not everyone wears their scars on their skin. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

What's the point of not taking chances? I don't know if I could stand living my whole life afraid. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

That pain moves when you move; it mutters between every breath; it spikes your ears; it rips. You think pain can't be any more horrible than that.

Until you discover that the well is bottomless. There's always more. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

As a doc, though, I've seen what happens when people are under a lot of stress. Doesn't always bring out their best. When people are scared, they get angry. They'll do things they never thought they would. They'll bargain and compromise in order to survive; they'll chase after miracle cures and believe just about anything so long as it gives them hope. When hope fails, then watch out. Some people get brutal. They'll turn on each other; they'll become their own worst enemies. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

My English teacher said that a writer is the worst judge of his own work. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Desire is so much sweeter when you cant have it. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

They call it the drowning instinct. It's when drowning doesn't look like drowning. (pg. 241) ~ Ilsa J. Bick

I doubted I would need my eyes. I drew in the dark, after all. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

It was, come to think of it, a little like a kinder, gentler Psycho-Dad making one of his command decisions. Exactly the same, only without all the fuss and blood. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

However ... ," Satan said.
Bick sighed. "However, I didn't count on the growing interference of lawyers, regulators, bureaucrats and politicians into my business. I swear it seems that every year they stick their noses into more and more."
Lucifer chuckled. "Sorry about that-I outdid myself there. ~ R.S. Belcher

You really didn't appreciate how thick, how powerful water was until you had to fight it. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Because if you can just hold off the moment when you must confront reality, time stands still and you can keep pretending that life will continue as you´ve known it: that nothing-not even something as wonderful and as terrible as love-has broken your world beyond repair. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and forgotten nightmares. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

For that matter, my heart is broken. So maybe they´ĺl give me his. It´s something to shoot for.
And maybe, in all that, Bob?
There is forgiveness... ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Would it interest you, at all, to know that he did try to scramble back onto the ice? That his hands grabbed and his fingers clawed, but the ice - that treacherous, greedy, teasing ice - kept breaking and breaking and breaking, sketching a path straight for me? And that when he saw what would happen to me, he stopped trying to save himself?
Would you believe that someone could love anyone that much? ~ Ilsa J. Bick

The grief in her green eyes slips then hardens and, for an instant, Pendleton sees the woman she has become and has no right being, not at sixteen. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Staying alive just to stay alive isn't enough. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

She'd drawn the moment of her death.
No. NO. She'd DRAWN herself to death. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Monster or not, he was risking his neck to save her. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

I am a ghost in a land of phantoms and remembered nightmares. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

The familiar was usually invisible; how many people really noticed everything they saw? ~ Ilsa J. Bick

She's got the kind of ethereal, unselfconscious beauty some young girls possess that breaks your heart. Or theirs. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Dewerman was this bearded 1960's throwback: a Teletubby in tie-dye, suspenders, and thinning hair scraped back into a stringy gray rat. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

There are those individuals who die for a cause, and we say they have made the ultimate sacrifice. We call them martyrs, and we never doubt their sincerity.
Yet many others search their entire lives for something - or someone - worth dying for and this is very different. These are the lonely and the desperate, fearful that their lives have no meaning. They yearn for the bullet, if only someone else will pull the trigger. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Honestly, Bob: how do you carve a scream? ~ Ilsa J. Bick

You want to brawl. You want to fight. Fighting tricks you into believing you can change the past, even when the past is dead and gone and all of it ashes. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

The truth is, Bob, that no matter how far or fast you go, the past always follows: an inky, faceless thing tacked to your shoes that only the harshest light can kill, and then just for those few moments when there is nothing but the strongest fire from the brightest sun, breaking over your shoulders, burning that shadow- and your past- to ash. ~ Isla J. Bick

Thinking about all that was exhausting. Despite the hours I'd spent getting shrink-wrapped, I still wasn't sold that talking did a whole heck of a lot except let everyone else know what was going on inside your head. It's not like talking ever made anything go away. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Raccoon." She saw Ellie put a hand to her mouth to cover the giggles and then looked back at Tom. "Like, you caught it?"
"Well, it sure didn't get Fed-Exed [ ... ] ~ Ilsa J. Bick

This Army of Light was mine. I had summoned it. I had DRAWN it.
Could I have stopped it? I don't know.
The truth is, I didn't want to. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

With no sense of smell, your memories dropped like pennies out of a ripped pocket, until the past was ashes and your parents were blanks: nothing more than the holes in Swiss cheese. ~ Ilsa Bick

I gargled a laugh, but I'd never felt more like crying in my life. I'm fine. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

We all have our fictions, little lies we tell ourselves to keep going from one day to the next. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Those brain-zapped kids weren't the only - or maybe even the worst - enemy. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

Don't get so caught up in looking behind you forget to look ahead. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

God simply is," Bick said. "Humanity embraced It. They gave It color and gender, shape and form. They put words in Its mouth. They always have, and they still do, perhaps they always will. I always experience God as a 'He,' but God is too vast to be held prisoner by language of biology. ~ R.S. Belcher

It was that stages-of-anger thing. I was shocked and then I got pissed and then I fought like hell ... and then I went numb. They called it acceptance, but it wasn't. It's what happens when you have only two choices: live with the monster, or kill yourself. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

How people react is going to be based on how you react. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

In my experience, the truly evil are few and good people, with the very best of intentions, often make very bad decisions and get in way over their heads before they know it. People drown, quietly, before our eyes, all the time. ~ Isla J. Bick

Something my shrink once said bubbled up from memory: believing that everything is your fault is like saying the world revolves around you and that is pure narcissism and no less destructive. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

When the heart sinks, people fall. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

That´s the problem with the truth.
Sometimes the truth is ambiguous, or really bad cliche. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

So I think I'll stay here a little while longer. There's plenty of time to get off this gurney and open that door and rejoin the rest of you.
There's all the time I have left on Earth.
There's the rest of my life. ~ Ilsa J. Bick

I´d never heard a man cry before, Bob, but...it´s awful. (...) I think some man aren´t used to it and don´t know what to do with all that feeling. Their emotions are hexane ignited in their chests and rips them apart, and then they feel like they´re going to die-just as something was dying, at that moment in Mitch. ~ Ilsa J. Bick