Steve Rasnic Tem QUOTES

1 " Stories are masks of God.

That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm.

Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth.

Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God.

So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , The Man on the Ceiling

2 " I was never very good with either my hands or feet. It always seemed to me they'd just been stuck on as an afterthought during my making. Dreams didn't translate through sports, or music, dancing, carpentry, plumbing. I was the bookish kid, more at home in the pages of a fantasy than in the room in the town on the planet. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , The Man on the Ceiling

3 " Sometimes I wait at the bottom of those dark stairs, I sit at the bottom of the stairs, I wait beyond the bottom of the stairs and listen to the sounds my wife and children make as they sleep, the sounds our animals make as they step carefully through our dreams and out the other side to polished floor and cold window. Sometimes I wait so long I become unsure if I am asleep, or awake, or dead. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , The Man on the Ceiling

4 " Everything changes your life. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , The Man on the Ceiling

5 " If you love someone, they leave you. But if you don't love someone, they leave you, too. So your choice isn't between loving and losing but only between loving and not loving. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem

6 " For so long I have lived on the edge of an invisible world. Sometimes I feel like the scattered debris left over after the personality has fallen out of the sky. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , The Man on the Ceiling

7 " For most of my life I've been a listener. At least in the beginning, I think the reason I listened so intently was to have a chance of hearing the train before it ran over me. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem

8 " Some people, I believe, are paid for dreaming. But most, I think, are punished. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Onion Songs

9 " A life was a secret thing, even between a husband and wife. Your secret life was completely your own, and because it was unknown, would never be mourned. The secret life of each individual went unhonored through eternity. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Deadfall Hotel

10 " Imagination transforms one substance into another. It changes what is into what might be, what was into what might have been. Straw becomes gold, gold straw, and neither is more real nor, I submit, more precious than the other. Pebbles turn into luminous pearls and pearls into little gray rocks, both solid and beautiful, both essential. Human beings take shape from clay, angels' wings are spun out of water, fire gives rise to the long tongues of demons, love emerges out of thin air, and the basic elements reconstitute themselves again and again."
-The Man In The Ceiling "

― Steve Rasnic Tem

11 " Each morning we awaken to find that life is a bit less understandable. Each morning we awaken to the disappearance of the known. Each morning we awaken to discover that we have missed the last bus for the life to come. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Onion Songs

12 " Everything is dangerous. Even in your dreams. Even if you sleep without dreams. From the moment you jump out of bed and take that first breath. Something terrible might happen. Someone's bound to die before the story is over. You might even fall in love."
-The Man On The Ceiling "

― Steve Rasnic Tem

13 " We carry our fears with us wherever we go. We pack them neatly, holding them close because if we lost them, where would we be? "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Deadfall Hotel

14 " You can’t leave your fears behind,’ he’d say, ‘until first you live inside them. You have to live inside your house of fear. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Deadfall Hotel

15 " I would have imagined that to be unimaginable. Sometimes I still do. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , The Man on the Ceiling

16 " Movies and books and all such products of the imagination are terrible things for most people because they make them believe that they can be other than what they actually are. Terrible and beautiful things. People sit and wait for the transformation, which never comes, as if they might arise from their chairs or depart the theater as other people entirely. Instead all that is left to them is to gather their addictions around them and to sing their onion songs. "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Onion Songs

17 " Paranoia is just having the right information.” —William S. Burroughs "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , In The Lovecraft Museum

18 " Love the individual. Fear the group, "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Deadfall Hotel

19 " I am the destroyer! I am the darkness at the end of time!” the werewolf screamed. “I am the slow corrupter, the rapid pestilence, the universal disassembler, the final stop on the journey! I am the madness without explanation! Love me and I will slaughter you! I will pick through your brains with my tongue! "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Ubo

20 " He would wake up crying, and wonder if there would come a time when the crying would stop, and he could not decide if that would be a good thing or not. And "

― Steve Rasnic Tem , Deadfall Hotel

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