James Pratt
James Pratt likes to create realistically flawed but basically decent characters and have them cross paths with serial killer angels, redneck vampires, slithering horrors from other dimensions, and the end of the world. He also likes to write stories that demonstrate how the ever-present darkness threatening to wash over the world like a wave of endless night can be held back with a little courage and a big shotgun (assuming one hasn't already used both barrels, of course). Some take place in the distant past, others in the far future, and still others somewhere between eight minutes ago and twelve minutes from now. Whether sci-fi, adventure, or straight-out horror, the running theme is that the universe is very, very big and we are very, very small.
“One of the things that helps use cope with loss is the fact that while memories may remian, the emotions associated with them will fade like old photographs. At the same time, there is a masochistic desire to retain those feelings spurred on by the dread of losing the power they hold. Sometimes I can't think of anything more awful than simply being human.”
“I like to think of myself as a fairly rational person. I believe in cause and effect and that's about it. But sometimes I have to wonder about all the various, seemingly unrelated things that conspire to form an improbable chain of events culminating in some awful, heart-wrenching conclusion. If someone is in control and there really is such a thing as fate or destiny or some divine plan, I can't help but think whoever or whatever is behind it just doesn't seem very nice. I don't relish the concept of non-existence, but I do find that a more comforting prospect than spending eternity in the presence of the thing behind the curtain.”
“Is religion our alien creators' way of testing our faith in science?”
“If shadows are curtains, mirrors are windows.”
“Time is a sculptor's knife, attacking the soft clay to reveal the hard edges beneath.”
“As McMasters raised the shotgun, the man removed his glasses. There were fields of stars where his eyes should have been. But they weren’t reflections of the night sky. These stars were a glimpse of a dim and distant future where the very laws of physics had been reduced to relics of a forgotten age. Feeble as dying embers, they were the palsied mourners at time’s wake.McMasters could hear the ultimate silence and feel the biting cold of the one true void. The promise of the eternal nothing beckoned to him. There was a sort of peace in the death it represented, not the death of mind and body but of shape and form. It was the final revelation, the casting off of life’s illusion in favor of the void’s embrace. from "Riders of the Necronomicon”
“If you attend Miskatonic University, your homework might eat your dog.”
“I have learned one lesson in all this and I will share it knowing it will do no one any good. The lesson is this: "There are none more complicit in one's undoing than one's own heart".”