18 Quotes by Gemma Files

Like a long black hood or so high coming down over your head, too slow to measure or even to notice. And each successive layer of the hood is only mesh, perfectly see-through...bust as they fold one over the other (over the other, over the other), your world gets more dim, dull, chill, and awful, almost beyond endurance. "Normal" getting worse, always and steadily, as "normal" is--so often--wont to do

The problem with all numinous things is that you can’t just take somebody’s word about them, especially the ones you’re warned away from. You have to look at them, eventually, to know they’re really there. You look at them even though you know it’s not a good idea to. You can’t not. In the end, you will always look at the thing you’re told not to just because it exists, if only to prove it exists.

Being a ghost is like being invisible, so being invisible must be like being a ghost. Like being inside the shadow, always blundering towards people with your hands out, angry that can’t see to comfort you.

In its purest form, done right, watching an experimental film is the closest you can come to dreaming another person’s dreams. Which is why to watch one is, essentially, to invite another person into your head, hoping you emerge haunted.

She is the only true thing.

The problem with all numinous things is that you can’t just take somebody’s word about them, especially the ones you’re warned away from. You have to look at them, eventually, to know they’re really there. You look at them even though you know it’s not a good idea to. You can’t not.

When the witness is ready, the ghost will appear. When things wear thin.

Yeah, well, maybe magic’s like that. Metaphor made real.

Funny word, that: “fault.” As in San Andreas. The crack through which one world intersects with the next, or vice versa. This crack in my head, still gaping open – a magnet, a haematoma, a dark and spreading pool. A cigarette-burn hole in the fabric of everything I see, or hear, or do; right in the middle, impossible to mend, impossible to disguise. Impossible to ignore.