Barron Laird Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Barron Laird. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.
Laird Barron
The cold impassive stars didn't bother him so much as the gaps between them did.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
It’s about walking, or crawling as the case may be, through this messy existence with eyes open. It’s about squeezing a fistful of shit and praying for a diamond.
Laird Barron
Curiosity did not kill the cat all by itself.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
The human condition can be summed up in a drop of blood. Show me a teaspoon of blood and I will reveal to thee the ineffable nature of the cosmos, naked and squirming. Squirming. Funny how the truth always seems to do that when you shine a light on it.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
I used to write as an escape. There’s no escape. There’s just me sending my voice into the dark, waiting for an echo." – Laird Barron
Laird Barron
Everyone is looking for the answer. They do not want to find the answer, trust me. Unfortunately, the answer will find them. Life—it’s like one of those unpleasant nature documentaries. To be the cameraman instead of the subjects, eh?
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
The deepest cavern in the world is the human heart.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
Enlightenment isn't necessarily a clean process. Enlightenment can be filthy, desperate, dangerous. Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
Neither light nor heat could withstand it; to gaze into that nullity and to comprehend its scope was to have one’s humanity snuffed. Only the inhuman thrived in out there in deep black.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
For they were the stuff of nightmares; maggoty abominations possessed of incalculable and vile intellect that donned flesh and spines of men and beasts to shield themselves from the sun and enable themselves to walk upright instead of merely slithering.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
—Only fools and the dead never change their mind.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
...he was trapped in the electrochemical web of cognition, wherein curiosity leads into temptation, temptation leads into fear, and fear is considered an impulse to be mastered.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
Money was a problem. Money was always a problem no matter how many bones he crushed or how much blood he let or dues he paid. The fucking rent was always due.
Laird Barron (The Light is the Darkness)
Robert Service once said dying is easy, it’s the keeping on living that’s hard, and of course the poet was on the money, as poets usually are when it comes to smugly self-evident affirmations.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
Brush snapped. The stag shambled forth from the outer darkness. It loomed above Scobie, its fur rank and steaming. Black blood oozed from gashes along its flanks. Beneath a great jagged crown of antlers its eyes were black, its teeth yellow and broken. Scobie fell to his knees, palms raised in supplication. The stag nuzzled his matted hair and its long tongue lapped at the muddy tears and the streaks of drying blood upon the man’s upturned face. Its muzzle unhinged. The teeth closed and there was a sound like a ripe cabbage cracking apart.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
If the sky, by sinister alchemy, or diabolical prestidigitation, transformed into a mirror of the mother sea, the primordial cradle; and if leviathans swam that breadth and hovered, softly undulating over the teaming habitations of the globe, feasting; what should you wear?
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
Actually, coyotes are much scarier than wolves. Sneaky, sneaky little suckers. Eat you up. Lick the blood all up.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
Wisdom devours the weak.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
Conrad might be on his way to achieving godhead and wouldn't that be a kick in the ass?
Laird Barron (The Light is the Darkness)
When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time - at the x before time began. Indeed, there were six billion other carbon-based sapient life forms moiling in the earth, but none of them were the real McCoy. I'm the real McCoy. The rest? Cardboard props, marionettes, grist for the mill. After I made me, I broke the mold under my heel.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
I am abroad in the night with my servants. We come to smoke the northern lights, to rape the Wendigo, to melt igloos with streams of hot, bloody piss. To see and see.” “Oh. You’re a bit east.
Laird Barron (X's For Eyes)
Mac, are we having an adventure? Is someone going to shoot at me? Am I going to be kidnapped again? Locked in a trunk and dropped into the sea? Experimented on with growth hormones? Chased by a lunatic in a mechanical werewolf getup? It sure feels like we’re having an adventure.” “Yep, we’re having an adventure,” Mac said.
Laird Barron (X's For Eyes)
That really your kind of crowd? These effete psychos who want to relive the seedier aspects of the Roman empire? These are the kind of folks who own tropical islands. Hell, some of them run banana republics for fun. They want a spectacle, I can fill the bill. Ah yes. Dictators, inbred nobility and other megalomaniacs. Swell friends you got there. It's a living.
Laird Barron (The Light is the Darkness)
It grew steadily dimmer, God’s thumb on the dial.
Laird Barron (The Light is the Darkness)
Nostalgia, it’s nothing but pain,” Robert said. “It’s memory poisoned by the anguish of loss.
Laird Barron (Autumn Cthulhu)
Autumn, like Alzheimer’s, turns everything strange and unfamiliar, and when you look for the shape of the real hidden within, you find only a promise of the winter to come.
Laird Barron (Autumn Cthulhu)
Presumption is a leading cause of death.
Laird Barron (X's For Eyes)
The subconscious is a doorway to the infinite.
Laird Barron (X's For Eyes)
Soul searching pairs seductively with large quantities of liquor.
Laird Barron (When Things Get Dark)
The whole political mess, the universal squalor, the essential pettiness of mankind oppressed him and he’d submerged himself in work and writing and books.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
There’s real evil, Mr Honey. Not that existential crap, either.
Laird Barron (The Best Horror of the Year: Volume Four)
The universe dilated within him, above him. Something like joy stirred in Lancaster’s being, a sublime ecstasy born of terror. His heart felt as if it might burst, might leap from his chest. His cheeks were wet. Drops of blood glittered on his bare arms, the backs of his hands, his thighs, his feet. Black as the blackest pearls come undone from a string, the droplets lifted from him, drifted from him like a slow motion comet tail, and floated toward the road, the fields. For the first time in an age he heard nothing but the night sounds of crickets, his own breath. His skull was quiet.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
I turn away and stare through the window at the field where the scotch broom creeps yellow as hell toward my doorstep. Six years and it has advanced from the hinterlands to the picket fence in the back yard. Six more years and it will have chewed this house to the foundation, braided my bones in its hair.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
Ramirez walked ahead with a torch he'd fashioned from a stick and some rags and by that queer and reddish light, devils, or the shadows of devils hooked to the shoes of the men and capered across the stony earth.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
Your father had other plans for you. Alas, his breakdown and untimely demise derailed everything he'd worked to accomplish. He would not approve of your quixotic pursuit of Imogene. She became embroiled in his vendetta with the forces of darkness, as it were. No sense following her into oblivion." Conrad said, "You talk a lot for a guy on oxygen.
Laird Barron (The Light is the Darkness)
but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean. In my mind, here was the best kind of art—the kind hoarded by rich and jealous collectors in their locked galleries; hidden from the eyes of the heathen masses, waiting to be shared with the ripe few
Laird Barron
The light in the gallery changed subtly and he whirled and saw someone approaching him from between the exhibit cases. The individual moved with alarming speed, bent low to the floor, but straightening as he or she drew nearer. Unfolding...
Laird Barron (The Croning)
Ye wanna steer clear o' 'im and 'is little friends. Ye shall come to a nasty end nosin' 'bout that gent." The Spy knew the refrain. He wondered aloud as to the nature of these little friends. "Ain't ever seen 'em, just 'eard of 'em. Cripples and deformed ones. Some ain't got no arms or legs is what I 'ear. they crawl along behind 'im, see? Wrigglin' in the dirt all ruddy worm-like." "He's got an entourage of folk without arms," the Spy said, raising his brows toward the brim of his cocked hat. "Or legs. Following him wherever he goes." "Some got arms, some don't. Some got legs, some don't. Some got neither. That's what I 'ear." The farmer shrugged, made the sign of warding again, and would say no more on the matter.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
A sculpture of the magnificent shape of God. Oh, admittedly it was a shallow rendering of That Which Cannot Be Named; but art is not relative to perfection in any tangible sense. It is our coarse antennae trembling blindly as it traces the form of Origin, tastes the ephemeral glue welding us, yearning after the secret of ineluctable evolution, and wonders what this transformation will mean.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
Hacked to pieces by a band of hillbilly satanists” hadn’t ever made my list of imagined ways of getting rubbed out—and as the Samurai warriors of yore meditated on a thousand demises, I too had imagined a whole lot of ways of kicking. Helios Augustus’s candle flame flickered in the black opening. He
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
The look in your eyes, boy. You’re afraid. A man like you is afraid, I take stock.” “I’ve known some fearless men. Hunted lions with them. A few of those gents forgot that Mother Nature is more of a killer than we humans will ever be and wound up getting chomped. She wants our blood, our bones, our goddamned guts. Fear is healthy.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
I cannot explain, nor must an artist defend his work or elucidate in such a way the reeling audience can fathom, brutes that they are.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
When, you wonder, does Sarah go west and build her rambling mansion? Not yet. Soon, but not yet. First, her husband has to do a blood-coughing two-step off this mortal coil.
Laird Barron (Primeval: A Journal of the Uncanny #1)
You create your characters, set things in motion, and then let those characters and the situations they encounter tell you how they’re going to end up.
Laird Barron (Primeval: A Journal of the Uncanny #1)
Cliché’s contain all truth,
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
Take a picture of God, tack it on the wall and see who bows.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
The universe and its design is often one of arbitrary horror.
Laird Barron (X's For Eyes)
He pointed the rifle at Orion’s Belt and squeezed off a round. Missed, or too early to tell.
Laird Barron (X's For Eyes)
Some people are born looking for a crock of shit to get their head stuck in.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All: Stories)
There are those who claim that Time is a ring. I have found it to be a maze, and my own role that of the Minotaur. Rabbit, O rabbit. Welcome to the maze.
Laird Barron (Man with No Name)
The amplified ukulele music was giving me a migraine.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
I may be a barbarian, but never a Luddite.
Laird Barron (Blood Standard (Isaiah Coleridge, #1))
Arthur said, “Let’s be cool and not get busted. I advise rest and relaxation, and definitely a bath. You guys smell like booze and cheap whores.” Dred sniffed. “He’s right. We do. Woof.
Laird Barron (X's For Eyes)
Blackness ate inward from the corners of my vision. Reality crumpled and bloomed like a cigarette burn on a movie screen. The hole let into an alternate universe, where the scene unfolded bloodily.
Laird Barron (Black Mountain (Isaiah Coleridge #2))
The purpose of my survival was to bear witness, to carry the tale. The thrill of spreading terror, of lurking in the night as bogeymen of legend, titillates them. They are beasts, horrid undreamt of marvels.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
When I was six, I discovered a terrible truth: I was the only human being on the planet. I was the seed and the sower and I made myself several seconds from the event horizon at the end of time—at the x before time began.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
Reality was a makeshift prop, an amalgamation of agreed-upon conjecture, a consensus of self-limiting parameters and paradigms made palatable by endless speculation fueled by madness and hope and no mean amount of good dope.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
I’m not here to warn anybody. I’m here to give you a good ol’ mindfucking, among other things. Think you found the book by accident? There are no accidents around here. Time is a ring. Everything and everyone gets squished under the wheel.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
The elder Navarro had believed, as did the ancient philosophers of the Far East, that the cosmos ultimately revealed itself as a repeating pattern, an infinitely replicating superstructure contained and embodied in a galaxy, down to a drop of blood.
Laird Barron (The Light is the Darkness)
Do you supplicate plutonium? Do you sing hymns to uranium? We bask in the corona of an insensate majesty. In its sway we seek to lay the foundation blocks of a new city, a new civilization. We're pioneers. Our frontier is the grand wasteland between Alpha and Omega.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence and Other Stories)
I held my breath as the door swung open and Meg Shaw stood in a spill of light from a Tiffany lamp. Her dress was ivory and sequined and it clung in exactly the right places to do me harm. White pumps and sheer stockings. Charm bracelet and a fine silver chain at her neck. Lucky I didn’t knock her out thrusting the posies in convulsive reflex.
Laird Barron (Blood Standard (Isaiah Coleridge, #1))
In fact, candy was at the top of the list of things she was supposed to avoid, especially holiday treats from strangers. But there were also dire warnings about public toilets, dogs (even on leashes), convenience stores (especially at night), unsupervised children and teens, electrical outlets (during storms), unlit rooms, steep staircases, carnival rides, banquet or buffet food, cocktails on a date, and all weather conditions.
Laird Barron (Autumn Cthulhu)
I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I’m rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my “essential saltes” as it were, I’m the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
Curtis Bane screamed and though I came around fast and fired in the same motion, he’d already pulled a heater and begun pumping metal at me. We both missed and I was empty, that drum clicking uselessly. I went straight at him. Happily, he too was out of bullets and I closed the gap and slammed the butt of the rifle into his chest. Should’ve knocked him down, but no. The bastard was squat and powerful as a wild animal, thanks to being a coke fiend, no doubt. He ripped the rifle from my grasp and flung it aside. He locked his fists and swung them up into my chin, and it was like getting clobbered with a hammer, and I sprawled into a row of trash cans. Stars zipped through my vision. A leather cosh dropped from his sleeve into his hand and he knew what to do with it all right. He swung it in a short chopping blow at my face and I got my left hand up and the blow snapped my two smallest fingers, and he swung again and I turned my head just enough that it only squashed my ear and you better believe that hurt, but now I’d drawn the sawback bayonet I kept strapped to my hip, a fourteen-inch grooved steel blade with notched and pitted edges—Jesus-fuck who knew how many Yankee boys the Kraut who’d owned it gashed before I did for him—and stabbed it to the guard into Bane’s groin. Took a couple of seconds for Bane to register it was curtains. His face whitened and his mouth slackened, breath steaming in the chill, his evil soul coming untethered. He had lots of gold fillings. He lurched away and I clutched his sleeve awkwardly with my broken hand and rose, twisting the handle of the blade side to side, turning it like a car crank into his guts and bladder, putting my shoulder and hip into it for leverage. He moaned in panic and dropped the cosh and pried at my wrist, but the strength was draining from him and I slammed him against the wall and worked the handle with murderous joy. The cords of his neck went taut and he looked away, as if embarrassed, eyes milky, a doomed petitioner gaping at Hell in all its fiery majesty. I freed the blade with a cork-like pop and blood spurted down his leg in a nice thick stream and he collapsed, folding into himself like a bug does when it dies.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
One part pulp, one part noir, two parts pure cosmic terror, blended smooth and seasoned with a literary skill that few possessed.
Ross E. Lockhart (The Children of Old Leech: A Tribute to the Carnivorous Cosmos of Laird Barron)
La rauca risata di Bronson Ford fu, in tutta risposta, fragorosa. Una sezione di buio s’increspò di fiamma pallida, e moltitudini di stelle presero a ruotare come attraverso un vetro deformato. Costellazioni aliene tremolarono a contorcersi mentre una macchia nera vi si espandeva attraverso; fra loro c’era il sole come una rossa brace consumata, il sistema solare e i suoi pianeti in decomposizione, e Terra… La Terra era ammantata in una velenosa foschia cremisi. Gli oceani ormai zuppa stagnante. Giungle in suppurazione ocra e marroni a ricoprire un emisfero; sterili deserti vulcanici a dominare l’altro. La maggior parte delle città erano sepolte in sabbie mobili, o sotto una vegetazione marcescente, o sprofondate in pozzi nella terra. Strutture ancora intatte ricoperte di fogliame, incrostate in ambrate glaciazioni, contorte in spuntoni di torri senza più somiglianza con le loro sembianze originali. Primati si radunavano in queste marginalmente abitabili regioni, ma, mentre la lente di Bronson Ford si avvicinava a ingrandire la scena, apparve chiaro che quei miserabili erano deformati e fuori sesto esattamente come i grattacieli. Le loro masse si accalcavano verso uno ziqqurat grande quanto l’Empire State Building. La possente struttura era stata edificata con la carne e le ossa di innumerevoli cadaveri senzienti. Un nero e sgocciolante tunnel sull’Altrove si apriva nel suo centro. A grumi, e quindi a mandrie, le figure in arrivo si elevarono nell’aria e vennero risucchiate verso l’iride in chiusura. Strillavano come strillano le mosche.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
Ecco il portale. Essere presi in esso vuol dire ritrovarsi trasportati alla dimora dei Figli dell’Antica Sanguisuga, signori tra gli Oscuri che servono vaste, cieche cose nelle desolazioni senza luce in cui la fisica mortale collassa nell’assurdo. Forse tu viaggerai fino alla stessa Antica Sanguisuga. Se io non fossi un tale codardo…
Laird Barron (The Croning)
Sognò che quella bestia lo gettava giù nel pozzo, quello che affondava nel suolo della grotta. Stava precipitando in esso, privo di forma e senza peso, non però in un baratro sotterraneo o un lago nel sottosuolo, ma nello spazio esterno, verso il cosmo. Accelerò attraverso i campi stellari oltre il potente sguardo del telescopio Hubble. La sua proiezione astrale zoomò verso una macchia di nera oscurità fra scintillanti punti luminosi e, nell’avvicinarsi, la chiazza si allargò in un vasto e terrificante alone esteso in lungo e in largo a comprendere in esso molti sistemi solari; una galassia minore e indipendente che gorgogliava avvolta su se stessa. Un ondeggiante coagulo contenente schiere di mondi morti, ognuno nel suo guscio sottilissimo. Dentro a quei vuoti pianeti, ben al di sotto delle superfici sterili, regnavano le tenebre. Mari di caldo sangue ne ricolmavano gli antri più interni. I Figli dell’Antica Sanguisuga, il cui autentico nome era soltanto un ringhio incomprensibile che riecheggiava dentro alla sua mente, vivevano nei sanguinolenti flutti torcendosi su rive d’ossa dure come il diamante, e in milioni di tunnel intarsiati e decorati di altre ossa, quelle mietute a uno stuolo di vittime in verdi e azzurri mondi maturi al punto giusto, proprio come la Terra. I Figli colavano e si contorcevano in rumorosi tumuli, e persino nel sogno Don ringraziava Dio di non poterne scorgere che un’impressione vaga. Poiché erano composti della stessa sostanza di cui sono fatti gli incubi; abominazioni verminose in possesso di vili e incalcolabili intelletti che indossavano carni e spine dorsali d’uomini, e di bestie, per schermarsi dal sole e poter camminare in posizione eretta anziché limitarsi allo strisciare..
Laird Barron (The Croning)
God lit a candle and then made us. He was afraid of being alone in the dark.
Laird Barron (Black Mountain (Isaiah Coleridge, #2))
I'm a wary believer in signs and portents. The universe is always muttering threats.
Laird Barron (Black Mountain (Isaiah Coleridge, #2))
Whatever else is true of a man, if he makes an offer, he's usually in a bind.
Laird Barron (Black Mountain (Isaiah Coleridge, #2))
Evolution is a circle—we’re sliding back to that endless sea of protoplasmic goop.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
Amidst this reevaluation and reordering, came the fugue, a lunatic element that found genesis in the void between melancholy and nightmare.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
Norma claimed there exists a certain quality of grief, so utterly profound, so tragically pure, that it resounds and resonates above and below. A living, bleeding echo. It’s the key to a kind of limbo.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
She feared that’s what they’d gradually become—a pair of mated animals who snapped and snarled at one another, who remained together due to instinct, to pure expediency.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
In the animal kingdom, paranoia equaled sanity.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
People, bugs. Step back far enough, it’s all the same.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
Only fools and the dead never change their mind.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
The girl was bright and possessed a wry wit. Definitely not a prized combination in anyone under thirty.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All: Stories)
Anni di vita nei pascoli dell’Alaska mi hanno influenzato nei confronti degli aspetti più crudi e oscuri della letteratura fantastica. Gravito attorno al freddo e al violento, alla nozione che la vita senziente sia fragile, temporanea, e in possesso, al massimo, di un frammento soltanto del disegno globale della vita. Paesaggi selvaggi e brutali, e sinistre vedute pastorali mi rendono felice.
Laird Barron (Nuovi incubi: I migliori racconti weird)
Il mio racconto weird tipo è quello che contravviene in modo essenziale alla realtà, che possiede almeno un cenno di alieno, e che emana inquietudine e disorientamento. Se posso citare la mia risposta da un’intervista per Weird Tales, in relazione a quale tipo di storia soddisfa i criteri weird: “quando c’è un senso di dislocazione dalla banale realtà, di sospensione delle leggi della fisica, di inversione o sovvertimento dell’ordine, di un cenno di alieno. Le storie weird toccano un registro diverso da quello degli altri generi. C’è l’esperienza del brivido ma è sostanzialmente diverso da quello che provo a seguito di un buon racconto horror. È qualcosa di personale. Io percepisco il weird come una tradizione letteraria distinta, intimamente collegata al fantasy e all’horror, e questa relazione è fluida, e forse anche un po’ complicata”.
Laird Barron (Nuovi incubi: I migliori racconti weird)
When he looked through the scope it was as if the largest part of him dissolved and what remained was the kernel everything sprang from. The cathode stole everything, rendered him nameless, a seed floating on a vast cosmic tidal current.
Laird Barron (Occultation and Other Stories)
Wind hissed through the leaves overhead, and for a moment it was like being underwater–the late afternoon light shining coral red through a canopy of oak and maple leaves.
Laird Barron (Autumn Cthulhu)
She can’t decide whether to call the cops or hide the body, roll the rental car into a ditch somewhere and torch it.
Laird Barron (Swift to Chase)
Like cobblestones, clouds formed a path that led down after the hidden sun, whose glow dyed the clouds a deep, purplish pink.
Laird Barron (Autumn Cthulhu)
It’s always damp here. The ocean uses the rain and mist to reach inland, and the ground’s a sponge, but if you build big enough fires and leave them burning, eventually things dry out.” He
Laird Barron (Autumn Cthulhu)
Look closely and I’m the one sitting in the background under a tree, naked, drinking from a horn.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
I was Oppenheimer's dread in microcosm, a miniature atom bomb. A destroyer of small things. Not worlds, nothing so grand, but individual bodies, individual lives.
Laird Barron
The mantra of Millennial anxiety: Mass Hysteria. Mass Hypnosis. Mass Production. Mass Transit. Mass Murder. Mass Media. Massacre. Mass Exodus. Mass Extinction.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence)
The night takes a long breath, and then I am among all that is.
Laird Barron (Swift to Chase)
like a psychotic Zen nightmare and I don't even know how to repair a goddamned motorcycle.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence)
The moon? No moon, only a sound stage in the Arizona desert. Stars were bullet holes in the galactic canvas. The
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence)
I hate puppets. Hate them. They descend from a demonic line parallel to mimes and clowns and are wholly of the devil, especially the lifelike variety.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
After years in the wilderness, he usually talked to himself.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)
His eyes were quick, albeit in a different sense than most people understand the word. They were quick in the sense that a straight line is quick, no waste, no second-guessing, thorough and methodical.
Laird Barron (The Imago Sequence)
When it was over and they were driving back into the hills, Luther, both hands locked on the wheel, asked what Don thought of the esteemed representatives of the people. After his grandson muttered whatever answer, Luther nodded without removing his eyes from the road and said, There is not enough rope on this wobbling ball of shit to hang those bastards. The conversation ended there.
Laird Barron (The Croning)
Ignorance is all the blessing we apes can hope for.
Laird Barron (Bulldozer)
Next came a sequence of weirdly static shots of a dark, watery expanse. The quality was blurred and seemed alternately too close and too far. Milk-white mist crept into the frame. Eventually something large disturbed the flat ocean—a whale breaching, an iceberg bobbing to the surface. Ropes, or cables lashed and writhed and whipped the water to a sudsy froth. Scores of ropes, scores of cables. The spectacle hurt my brain. Mist thickened to pea soup and swallowed the final frame.
Laird Barron (The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All)