Chris Adrian

“I am...sad and angry. I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.”

“I am...sad and angry. Why is my spirit so sad and angry? I look back at my life and all I can remember is rage and rage and rage.”

“If I showed you what was in my heart," she said, "it would burn you to a cinder."I've tried to burn you similarly," it said, "but you never even noticed when I opened my chest.”

“He never got a really proper look at them, but the situation told him it must be a swarming flock of vaginas that flew all around his head, biting him toothlessly on his ears and his cheeks and his neck.”

“He went through rooms he named as he discovered them, and which he hardly had time to appreciate before he'd flung open a door at the far end and plunged through. . . . and in the Library of All the Same Book he actually stopped to examine a few of the volumes, all titled Various, that lined the shelves.”

“I worry that we all just sat around, after a while, trying to enjoy a ride that was never meant to be fun.”

“I used to feel sorry for them, or sad. Not so much any more. Now I wonder what they did, and I know what they did, and all I can think is how all that water is barely enough to cover it up.”

“The knowledge of my depravity is the only thing that makes me special... that I have always always always known, and have never for a moment been able to forget, that there is something terribly wrong with me.”

“I wanted to tell you that I was so sad I felt as if I might be happy, or in love, simply because such powerful feelings can appear the same to the naive. I was mighty with grief, and I thought I should be empowered by it. I thought my hands should shine with a yellow light, and that should I reach out to touch our mother on the head, I would call her back from the place she'd gone.”

“But as surely as the moon rises and the sun sets, depravity passes down through the ages, because there is always a gap between who we are and who we should be, and our parents, molested by regret, conceive us under the false hope that we will be better than them, and everything they do, every hug and blow, only makes certain that we never will be.”

“It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.”

“I shall not weep for any of them, nor regret their fate, nor shake one feather in sympathy.”

“If there’s a magic pony in the story, chances are I’ll read it.”