Nick Cutter Quotes

The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.

How could you hide from a murderer who lives under your skin?

They’d made a pact to be friends forever, but forever could be so, so brief.

You hold on to life until it gets ripped away from you. Even if it gets ripped away in pieces. You just hold on.

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it’s hopeless. It’s like the end is always there, you can’t escape it, but things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything’s been stripped away. Their bodies and happiness and hope.

Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned.

Nick chided a censor, who wished some books gone, and suggested she scan Fahrenheit 451. For the book-budget cutters, Old Claus had no plan, cause if they could read, they just read Ayn Rand.

Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man? Edgerton asks me with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris. It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.

His fear was whetted to such a fine edge that he could actually feel it now: a disembodied ball of baby fingers inside his stomach, tickling him from the inside. That's what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.

There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength—a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.

Fear finds a home in you. It finds the softest spots imaginable and sets up residence.

Prepare the lifeboats, mates! The SS Sanity is capsizing! We're going down!

The water wasn't the same down here. Water is what runs out of the kitchen taps or a playground drinking fountain. It fills bathubs and pools and yes, of course, the ocean- but at a certain depth, water becomes a barrier from all you remember, all you think you know. You're trapped within it, a plaything of it. Focus erodes. Your thoughts mutate. The pressure. The pressure. The soul can't cope with that. It shouldn't be expected to. Humans weren't built for this. There's a reason nothing lives down here. Or nothing should.

The dividing line between genius and insanity is very thin and quite permeable—which is why so many geniuses descend into madness.

Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.

They say cockroaches will be the last things left on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Don't believe it. The last thing on earth will be a worm in the guts of those cockroaches, sucking them dry.

It came down to that flexibility of a person’s mind. An ability to withstand horrors and snap back, like a fresh elastic band. A flinty mind shattered. In this way, he was glad not to be an adult. A grown-up’s mind—even one belonging to a decent man like Scoutmaster Tim—lacked that elasticity. The world had been robbed of all its mysteries, and with those mysteries went the horror. Adults didn’t believe in old wives’ tales. You didn’t see adults stepping over sidewalk cracks out of the fear that they might somehow, some way, break their mothers’ backs. They didn’t wish on stars: not with the squinty-eyed fierceness of kids, anyway. You’ll never find an adult who believes that saying “Bloody Mary” three times in front of a mirror in a dark room will summon a dark, blood-hungry entity. Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child—leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. Or maybe there is: you just grow up. And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed . . . well, they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening. That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.

It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world.

Adults are obsolete children.” —DR. SEUSS

Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.

The past had a perfection that the future could never hold

I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard.

Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it's hopeless. It's like the end is always there, you can't escape it. But things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything's been stripped away, their bodies and happiness and hope. Things just don't know when to die, I wish they did. I wish my friends had known that, sort of anyway. But I'm glad they tried, that's part of being human right? Part of being any living thing. You hold onto life until it gets ripped away from you, even if it gets ripped away in pieces, you just hold on.

An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was—what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?

I think sometimes your blood asks you a question. One that forces you to put yourself at risk for something you really need—a thing so important that the rest of your life hinges on it, and the penalty of not going for it means you’ll live half the life you could have.

He couldn't get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded—wormed—into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.

If you call the tune, you also have to pay the piper when he begs his due.

Still, he was angry--that particular anger of humans defied by the persistence of nature.

You wanted to play King Shit, Kent. Well, you played it. Now wear your crown of turds.

The night’s silence stretched over the immensity of the ocean—an impossibly quiet vista that stirred fear in Max’s heart. Would death be like that: endless liquid silence?

Memories degrade. You remember parts of people, but you surrender their wholes.

What if you find out she lusts to skin you alive, harvesting Kleenex-sized sheets of flesh to consume like Fruit Roll-Ups?

Known is problematic. Known isn’t beloved, it isn’t respected, it isn’t admired. It can be the most dehumanizing thing of all, becoming known.

Information isn’t always power. Information can do harm just as easily as ignorance.

Maybe it was for the best. He could just go gibberingly, shit-smearingly insane.

If there was one thing he wanted to tell his lost friends, it was that lots of adults didn’t have a goddamn clue. It was one of the sadder facts he’d had to come to grips with. Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.

He understood how the world worked—bad things happened to good people, bad people died happy in their beds. It happened every day. So why bother being good? The word itself was attached to a series of behaviors that was, at best, an abstraction. A person profited nothing from being good.

Well, time works differently down here, boss. Sometimes I feel like I've lived a thousand lifetimes ... it's funny. The pain is constant. Sometimes it's so much that I can't stand it. I bite at myself, tear my skin off, but I can never quite die. Like I said, funny. But to hurt is to love, right?

The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death.

It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people the love they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.

It’s all so goddamn fragile. Your life and the thread you carry it on. And the more love you carry, the more stress you put on that thread, the better chance it will snap. But what choice do any of us have? You take on that love because to live without it is to exist as half a person. You give that love away because it is in you to give, not out of a desire for recompense. And you keep loving even when the world cracks open and reveals a black hole where all that love can get swallowed.

Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the "right people," whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child-leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement's light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There's no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. Or maybe there is: you just grow up. And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things-but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed... well, they can't summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don't believe it could be happening. That's what's different about kid: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.

He began to cry then, clutching LB. The tears came easily. He had not cried tears of such distilled regret since his son had gone missing. LB was going limp, either spent, tired of fighting, or resigned to her fate. Luke hugged her so, so tight. He wanted LB to remember his touch. The warmth and love that radiated from his whole body, coupled with the sadness that she was being ripped away from him. He wanted her to take that one physical memory with her wherever she was going. The imprint of his hands on her. He wished it to be a reminder that she was a good creature, and loved, and that there were places on the continuum where love and kindness still existed, even if she did not share that world presently. She did not deserve this. But things happened. They happened.

He would wonder at their fates. Such a strange path to chart. The heart pulls, the mind resists. The heart wins. It wins. Nobody can chart the shape of his or her life before that shape emerges. There is hardly any rhyme to that shape and almost no reason. And that is the grandest, the most irreducible mystery of all.

Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply. “A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do.

I thought: This is how it COULD be. If I wasn’t ME. If I existed in a different body, an acceptable body, a body everyone loved. If I didn’t live in North Point, where I’m like this train on rails: I know where I’m going, hate it, but can’t change course. This was who I could’ve been if the ball had bounced just a bit differently, you know?

Amos Flesher struck her as many men of the cloth had done over the years: a bully who had learned to fight with scripture rather than his fists.

MICAH HENRY SHUGHRUE awoke into a darkness so thick it was like all nights folded together. He

it’s like leaving the Hope Diamond in a bus station locker: as long as nobody really understands its value, it’s perfectly safe where it is.” Felz

They were slick with the kind of adrenal perspiration that squeezes from the pores like the sweat off foreign cheese.

Getting teased your whole life must force you to grow some pretty hard bark.

Luke hissed, a release of pent-up anger and fear, and gave it a kick, which only sent a spike of pain shooting up to his knee.

The dream drained from his brainpan, thick as syrup.

...you can't eat a grub, man. You'd be depriving that young moth of its life goal of bashing into a lightbulb all night.

Soldering iron, Max.” Tim cauterised the severed veins. Medical instruments were often just precision variations of the same tools handymen used.

Fear is just weakness exiting the body.

-the wind called a mordant note through the sickly trees while other less explicable sounds scraped up the beach-head toward him-waiting for the unknown wickedness to arrive.

unknown to him then.

Life was too damn tough on its own terms to go depriving yourself further.

How do you make a hormone?” “How?” “You refuse to pay her.

What are you so afraid of? said that same voice inside Luke’s head. Everything, another voice answered.

His eyes were miserably bright and aware, bulging with pure shock and horror: the eyes of a little boy who’d come face-to-face with the nameless horror lurking under his bed.

His final surface sight was of a new moon hovering in its eastern orbit: a waxen ball whose light plated the slack darkness of the sea. Then they slipped under and were gone.

They wanted answers. Which was all people like them ever wanted. Any answers at all, so they didn’t have to think on their own.

Maybe the universe wasn’t such an asshole after all. But it sure as hell made you suffer something fierce.

...forever could be so, so brief.

That’s what mortal terror felt like, he realized. Tiny fingers tickling you from the inside.

If this was the apocalypse, it was to be an orderly and complacent one.

What if you could hear the running hum of your closest friend's thoughts? What if you find out she lusts to skin you alive, harvesting Kleenex-sized sheets of flesh to consume like Fruit Roll-Ups?

Her name was a joke, she said, like Karen Cutter's family nick-naming her Cookie, or poor Marie Antoinette Jones, whose parents had liked the sound of the name but who were a tad weak in French history.

Newton was unfailingly kind and polite, read books, and made obvious attempts at self-betterment—the equivalent of an air-raid siren blaring in a tranquil neighborhood: NEeeeerd-AleeeRT! NEeeeerd-AleeeRT!

The notion that adulthood is this place Harry and I were moving toward, and right now we’re collecting baggage, suitcases stuffed with stress and sadness, but we actually need those because what’s inside will furnish our new homes over in Adultland. And as soon as we get there, we’ll start collecting more so that when we die, the coroner’ll say it was anal cancer or heart failure, but really it was the weight of all we’d been carrying.

It doesn’t really look like a bear,” Max said one night. “Why should it?” Ephraim said, sounding angry. “That’s humans trying to, like, organize the stars to our liking. You think the Big Guy, the Grand Creator, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever said: Oh, guess I’d better make these flaming balls of gas look exactly like a bear or a fucking spoon so those stupid goons on rock 5,079 don’t get confused?” He lip-farted. “Ohyeahriiiight,

But you can’t have it all, not at once, every duck in a row. Life won’t bend that way, and a belief in the possibility is corrosive… and all the while, the most precious stuff is sprinkled right at your feet, waiting to be held.

This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, essential, Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.

Nothing gold can stay. The line captured Plum, sure, but it was as much about, I guess, how briefly any of us are really young. The part of our lives that was shortening by the minute, slipping through our fingers, and we’d never guess where the finish line lay until our chests snapped the tape.

People don’t, as they get lulled into the ridiculous belief that if they go along, play nicely and be agreeable, this maniac will do as he promised. They think that the longer they can persist without having to make a real choice, that life-and-death one, things might somehow, magically, just… work out.

Jeff Jenks showed up to say he was sorry but not really - some men are incapable of offering a sincere apology, Max realized; something in their nature refuses it, so instead they frame it as an accident, a misunderstanding, or a "sorry you're so upset" sort of thing that placed subtle blame on the other person for making such a big deal.

Light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second. And still, it takes a billion years to get here. That’s how big the universe is. It’s 99.99999999 percent darkness. And did you know that the stars we’re looking at right now could be dead already? Burned up, nothing but a black hole. We’re just seeing their ghosts. Ghosts that traveled a quintillion miles just to say Boo!

It doesn’t really look like a bear,” Max said one night. “Why should it?” Ephraim said, sounding angry. “That’s humans trying to, like, organize the stars to our liking. You think the Big Guy, the Grand Creator, Buddha or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or whoever said: Oh, guess I’d better make these flaming balls of gas look exactly like a bear or a fucking spoon so those stupid goons on rock 5,079 don’t get confused?

I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard. That’s what Mom does with me sometimes. She wants me to be so safe that it ends up hurting me in a weird way. But I get it, y’know? It must be the hardest thing in the world, caring for someone. Trying to make sure that person doesn’t come to harm.

Ebenezer was unsure that human minds were built to cope with any of . . . of what happened down there. He felt no shame thinking that, either, as he did not believe humans were built to come to grips with anything that existed beyond their conventional means of reckoning. When humans experience something that challenges their fundamental belief of the world—its reasonableness, its fixed parameters—well, their minds crimp just a bit.

You know what my sister said to me once? She said that maybe the best thing about having a child, especially a young one, was that you could love that child shamelessly. She said that you could put everything into that kid, love crazily, give everything in your heart and mind and soul over to that other person. You can’t do that for a husband or a wife, not really. The only other entity you could love that way would be God, if you’re a believer.

Worst of all were the man’s eyes—always the eyes, wasn’t it? A calm ongoing shade of brown, and the most awful part was that something continued to live in them—because normally there’d be nothing, right? Defeated and foggy and unthinking, to match the body. But these eyes harbored a remote intellect, a keen awareness. Which was the scariest part: this man had to confront the devastation of his body. He was cognizant of his own ruin. How could he possibly cope with that?

Can you fly?” She couldn’t keep the hushed wonder from her voice, and Nick smiled. “No. Too much weight. I can’t focus the air pressure enough for that.” “What does air pressure have to do with anything?” “Are you kidding? Air pressure is awesome.” She rolled her eyes. “You are such a nerd sometimes. You’re lucky you’re hot or you couldn’t get away with saying things like air pressure is awesome.” “Seriously. Air pressure affects everything. Haven’t you ever heard the expression nature abhors a vacuum?” He grinned. “Actually, we were doing this experiment in class once where Dr. Cutter was trying to prove a point with a balloon, but I kept making it pop—” “You are the only person alive who would use superpowers to be more dorky.” “They’re not superpowers.” That sounded a lot like the difference between to-MAY-to and to-MAH-to to Quinn.

Adults were scared of different things: their jobs, their mortgages, whether they hung out with the “right people,” whether they would die unloved. These were pallid compared to the fears of a child—leering clowns under the bed and slimy monsters capering beyond the basement’s light and faceless sucking horrors from beyond the stars. There’s no 12-step or self-help group for dealing with those fears. Or maybe there is: you just grow up. And when you do, you surrender the nimbleness of mind required to believe in such things—but also to cope with them. And so when adults find themselves in a situation where that nimbleness is needed . . . well, they can’t summon it. So they fall to pieces: go insane, panic, suffer heart attacks and aneurysms brought on by fright. Why? They simply don’t believe it could be happening. That’s what’s different about kids: they believe everything can happen, and fully expect it to.

It spun and capered behind her golden irises, which seemed to tick clockwise, snipping off each second.

That's part of being human, right? Part of being any living thing. You hold on to life until it gets ripped away from you. Even if it gets ripped away in pieces. You just hold on.

His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes went wide—wider than ever should be possible. It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world.

Why should he respect adults—because they were older? Why, if that age hadn’t come with wisdom?

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts. Carl Jung.

Shelley was something of a sensualist. He relished touch—pressure. How would it feel, physically, to take this creature apart?

There was something thrilling about leading the others in such an enormous act of rebellion.

The shrimp chips aren’t half bad. Kinda of like Cheetos except, y’know, fishy.

not far from the university campus. On quiet Saturdays in September he could hear the roar from Kinnick Stadium.

The water was a chilly blue—it reminded Luke of Barbicide, the disinfectant solution the old barbers in Iowa City used to soak their combs in. That stuff’ll kill you dead if you drink it, one of the barbers told Luke when he was a boy, as if suspecting Luke had harbored that very desire.

How’s it going, buddy?” Luke said, smiling. “How you doin’, Zach Attack?

Do you want to know the best, most effective transmitter of contagion known to man?' Edgerton asks me this with a pinprick of mad light dancing in each iris. 'It's love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people they love that they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes.' He shrugs, 'But that's people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.

I guess some people must find it funny that Tom was a fat kid.” Claire Padgett smiles, but there’s not a drop of humor in it. “Yeah, I guess a certain type of person would find that deliciously ironic, considering how things came out in the wash.