Quotes from The Drowning Girl

“Language is a poor enough means of communication as it is. So we should use all the words we have.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“There's always a siren, singing you to shipwreck. Some of us may be more susceptible than others are, but there's always a siren. It may be with us all our lives, or it may be many years or decades before we find it or it finds us. But when it does find us, if we're lucky we're Odysseus tied up to the ship's mast, hearing the song with perfect clarity, but ferried to safety by a crew whose ears have been plugged with beeswax. If we're not at all lucky, we're another sort of sailor stepping off the deck to drown in the sea.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“No one ever said you have to be dead and buried to be a ghost.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the minds of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“It's a myth that crazy people don't know they're crazy. Many of us are surely as capable of epiphany and introspection as anyone else, maybe more so. I suspect we spend far more time thinking about our thoughts than do sane people.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways... Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“You could have kept on driving and never looked back. No one's ever had to stop for me. Or even hear me. Anyway, you did, and now I'm afraid the time for choice is behind us both.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“You love someone. You don’t leave her to drown. And you don’t tell her she’s crazier than she already knows that she is!”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“I could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It's entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Eva was only a slut. She never had the requisite motivation to be anything so useful or lucrative as a whore.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Writing makes it even harder than concrete. Writing makes it hard as diamond.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“I inspect everything more closely, and there is about every surface—the river, the forest, the bark of the trees, the underbrush between them, even my own skin—there is about it all the unmistakable texture of linen stretched and framed. And this is when I feel the camel’s hair brush and the oil paint dabbing tenderly, meticulously, at the space below my navel.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“That's another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“No one ever said you have to be dead and buried to be a ghost. Or if they did, they were wrong.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Ella me besó. Ella me está besando. Siempre, ella me besará. Ésta es la manera en la que funcionan los hechizos.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Y me cantó durante días y días, noches y noches, convirtiéndome en el recipiente de los recuerdos de un fantasma.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Tem cheiro de poeira e de tempo”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“I began to imagine orchestration where before I heard only the cacophony of randomness. Crazy people do that all the time, unless you buy into the notion that we have the ability to perceive order and connotation in ways closed off to the minds of "sane" people. I don't. Subscribe to that notion, I mean. We are not gifted. We are not magical. We are slightly or profoundly broken.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“After Abalyn said what she said, I panicked. Someone tells me I can't remember what I definitely do remember, and sometimes I panic. I'm not as used to it as I often pretend. As I pretend to be used to it, I mean to say. The false memories.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“I began keeping diaries after they locked Rosemary up at Butler and I went to live with Aunt Elaine in Cranston until I was eighteen, but even the diaries can't be trusted. For instance, there's a series of entries describing a trip to New Brunswick that I'm pretty sure I never took. It used to scare me, those recollections of things that never took place, but I've gotten used to it.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“if dreams may be called passions. I see no reason not to call them passions”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“En ocasiones, las personas hechizadas llegan a un punto en el que, o bien logran ahuyentar a los fantasmas, o los fantasmas los destruyen. Lo que empeora más esto, incluso, es el hecho de que normalmente no funciona el intentar sacar a rastras a los fantasmas y confinarlos en un lugar donde ya no puedan dañarnos. Creo que, por lo general, sólo los propagamos cuando intentamos hacer eso. Se puede hacer una copia, o transmitir una parte infinitesimal del fantasma, pero la mayor parte se queda enterrada tan profundamente en tu mente que jamás se mueve de allí.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“—¿Ella te amaba?
—Ella amaba a la persona que pensó que era yo, o a la persona que ella pensó que era yo cuando nos conocimos. Pero no, no creo que me amara. Ni siquiera sé si me conocía. No creo que yo la conociera a ella.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Puede que suene estúpido si digo que su apariencia era de otro mundo, pero es que ella era de otro mundo. Peor aún, suena presuntuoso, ¿no es cierto? Presupone que sé todo lo que es de este mundo, y por ello puedo reconocer cualquier cosa que no lo sea. Por supuesto, no es así. Pero ésa es la impresión que ella dejó en mí.t”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“El mundo está lleno de sirenas. Siempre hay una sirena cantándote para hacerte naufragar. Algunos de nosotros tal vez seamos más susceptibles que otros, pero siempre hay una sirena. Puede estar con nosotros toda nuestra vida, o pueden pasar muchos años, décadas, antes de encontrarla o de que nos encuentre. Pero cuando nos encuentra, si no tenemos la suerte de ser Odiseo escuchando la canción con perfecta nitidez atado al mástil del barco, tripulado sin riesgos por marineros con los oídos taponados con cera de abeja… si no tenemos esa suerte, somos otra clase de marino, de la clase que salta por la borda y se ahoga en el mar.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Las sirenas son pensamientos invasivos que incluso los hombres y mujeres cuerdos experimentan. Se les puede llamar sirenas, o se les puede llamar encantamientos. Da igual. Cuando Odiseo escuchó a las sirenas, dudo que jamás olvidara su canción. Probablemente permaneció hechizado por ella el resto de su vida. Incluso después de su terrible viaje de veinte años de duración, el certamen de arqueros, e incluso después de recobrar a Penélope y del «final» feliz de la historia, debió de seguir hechizado por aquella canción, en sus sueños y en sus momentos de vigilia. Cada vez que contemplaba el mar o el cielo.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

“Nothing is ever straightforward, though we lose a lot of the truth by pretending it's so.”
― Caitlín R. Kiernan, quote from The Drowning Girl

Video

About the author

Popular quotes

“I'll never take it for granted again. I'll always be grateful for every spring that comes along.”
― Lurlene McDaniel, quote from Don't Die, My Love

“(Questlove) Is this the most revolutionary thing to happen to Broadway, or the most revolutionary thing to happen to hip-hop?”
― Lin-Manuel Miranda, quote from Hamilton: The Revolution

“I lurve you, circus freak," Cabel says.
It almost hurts to hear him say that.
I lurve you, too, you big lumpy monster man," Janie says.
That hurts even more to say.”
― Lisa McMann, quote from Gone

“Do you want to eat Peyotl and human flesh on the path to spiritual enlightenment? Or just for the hell of it? Join the ancient cult of Anasazi.”
― Warren Ellis, quote from Transmetropolitan, Vol. 1: Back on the Street

“Ugh, I swear I'd rather stab myself in the eye with a spoon repeatedly than be nice to some idiot, which means pretty much anyone I come in contact with. Damn, I'd be stabbing my eye a lot.”
― Quinn Loftis, quote from Beyond the Veil

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.