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Famous Caitlín R. Kiernan Quotes

“There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.”

SongMadnessSafetyLuckInsanityHauntingDrowningSailorShipwreckShipDrownOdysseusSiren
Book:The Drowning Girl
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“I’m stacking days, building a house of cards made from nothing but days. Monday is the Ace of Hearts. Saturday is the Four of Spades. Wednesday is the Seven of Clubs. Thursday night is, I suspect, the Seven of Diamonds, and it might be heavy enough to bring the whole precarious thing tumbling down around my ears. I would spend an entire hour watching cards fall, because time would stretch, the same way it stretches out to fill in awkward pauses, the way it stretched thin in that thundering moment of a car crash. Or at the edges of a wound.”

MetaphorTrauma
Book:Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan, Volume 2
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“O que mais tememos não é o conhecido. O conhecido, por mais horrível ou prejudicial à existência, é algo que podemos compreender. Sempre podemos reagir ao conhecido. Podemos traçar planos contra ele. Podemos aprender as suas fraquezas e derrotá-lo. Podemos nos recuperar de seus ataques. Uma coisa tão simples quanto uma bala poderia ser suficiente. Mas o desconhecido desliza através de nossos dedos, tão insubstancial quanto o nevoeiro.”

FearFightUnknownDefend Yourself
Book:The Drowning Girl
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“It is not the task of a writer to 'tell all,' or even to decide what to leave in, but to decide what to leave out. Whatever remains, that meager sum of this profane division, that's the bastard chimera we call a 'story.' I am not building, but cutting away. And all stories, whether advertised as truth or admitted falsehoods, are fictions, cleft from the objective facts by the aforementioned action of cutting away. A pound of flesh. A pile of sawdust. Discarded chips of Carrara marble. And what's left over. "Houses Under The Sea”

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Author:Caitlín R. Kiernan
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“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.”

MenMindMayEndsMomentsStoriesPurposeGivenEventsFundamentalsObjectivesRelatePreciseConstructsArbitraryConvenientMessyTransientMomentaryBeginnings And Endings
Author:Caitlín R. Kiernan
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“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.”

WayNeedsBookDifferentStoriesFilmSongSocialThousandDaughterHorseSuicidePhotographDifferent WaysGrandmotherHostHauntingDiagnosisFadedBedtimeSchizophreniaChoreographyPerniciousYour DaughterContagionMemesViralBedtime Stories
Author:Caitlín R. Kiernan
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