Caitlin R. Kiernan

• "Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time."
• "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."
• "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."
• "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."
• "I asked him if the trick to a lucrative career in psychology was to tell people whatever might make them feel better, by absolving them of responsibility. I look around me and I see so many people intent upon absolving themselves of responsibility. On passing the buck, shifting the blame."
• "Com frequência, digo coisas que apenas gostaria que fossem verdade, como se soltar as palavras no mundo pudesse fazê-las assim. Pensamento positivo. Pensamento mágico, parte e parcela da minha mente doente. Digo coisas que não são verdade porque preciso que sejam verdade. É isso que os mentirosos e as pessoas tolas fazem." (Coudn't find the original)