45 Quotes by Adam Nevill

I thought to myself: this is how civilisation ends. Standards decline, accountability ends, the rule of law is impotent, the thugs take over and do what they will. And those of us softened by convention, courtesy and all the privileges of post-historical freedom are dispossessed, victimised and turned into refugees in our own neighbourhoods and homes.

For Anne and our cub,for making me and my life less beastly

Over there, Dante, are three clever debunkers. You know what a debunker is? A person who lacks imagination, Dante. Who can only thrive in the world. Their dull creed replaced spirituality with a new god of economics. But what has that achieved? People are dissatisfied, bored, unfulfilled. Those three can do nothing but mock the intuitive and the creative. Like us, Dante, who flee the everyday world and seek a meaning through our endeavours. We are the fortunate ones.

Through their discomforts Dom and Phil were missing everything of interest: the sudden strip marshes, the faces in the rock formations, the perfect lakes, the awesome måskoskårså valley grooved into the earth during the Ice Age, the golden eagle circling above it, and the views of a landscape it was impossible to believe existed in Europe.

It had not hurt his hands at all and the sudden release of energy, twinned with Dom's fall, gave him a sudden lunatic rush of euphoria.

But it would be broadcast, and in the great public theatre of his age; that unregulated market of braying narcissists, that Wild West of disinformation and fraud, that infinite sea of piracy, the great electorate where the constituency of billions voted their approval with a click of a mouse. The internet. It brought governments down and rewrote history...

Regret: the most corrosive horror.

We seem incapable of being led by any but the monstrous. The malignant narcissist. And there are many willing to take the place of a deposed tyrant, to ape them. And the rest of us, down here, cannot discriminate in the choice of our leaders, even if we have anything resembling a real choice. We cannot lead ourselves rationally or humanely or fairly, so we choose the most unscrupulous and egotistical to lead us. Into one war and one holocaust after another.

The greatest treasures were most often guarded by the slyest and cruellest dragons.