12 Quotes by Ian McGuire

The redundancy of flesh, he thinks, the helplessness of meat, how can we conjure spirit from a bone?

Oh, the others will talk and plan and make oaths and promises, but there are precious few fuckers who will do.

The most important questions are the ones we can't hope to answer with words. Words are like toys : they amuse and educate us for a time, but when we come to manhood, we should give them up.'Sunmer shakes his head.' The words are all we have,' he says.' If we give them up, we are no better than the beasts.'Otto smiles at Sunmer's wrong headedness.' Then you must find out the explanations on your own, if that is what you truly think.

It is not a sin, he tells himself, there is no sin left now, there is only the blood and the water and the ice; there is only life and death and the gray-green spaces in between. He will not die, he tells himself, not now, not ever. When he is thirsty, he will drink his own blood; when he is hungry, he will eat his own flesh. He will grow enormous from the feasting, he will expand to fill the empty sky.

Cleverness, he thinks, will get you nowhere; it is only the stupid, the brilliantly stupid, who will inherit the earth.

Midnight.

He is not ashamed of what he has been or done: a man makes his mistakes, he tells them, a man suffers as he must suffer, but the readiness is all.

It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage. Sumner.

I’ve brought the sufferings on myself, I’d say. I’ve made mistakes aplenty.” “Show me a man who hasn’t, and I will show you a saint or a great liar. And I haven’t met too many saints in my long lifetime.” The.