Nic Pizzolatto Quotes

By then Esthappen and Rahel had learned that the world had other ways of breaking men. They were already familiar with the smell. Sicksweet. Like old roses on a breeze.

Life is like a concentration camp... you can't leave without dying.

Trauma is survivable, but often not much more. It kills you while allowing you to still live.

I myself should also be dead already, but I am still here.

Life is a predicament which precedes death.

When I did 'Bumble-ardy,' I was so intensely aware of death. Eugene, my friend and partner, was dying here in the house when I did 'Bumble-ardy'. I did 'Bumble-ardy' to save myself. I did not want to die with him. I wanted to live, as any human being does.

What people can survive and what they don't survive is shocking to me. Someone can go to Iraq and be blown to bits and survive. Someone can trip and fall on the street and they die - that's that.

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.

I think we would be dead and gone if we were just mostly failing.

In 'A Chosen Few,' I spent hours and hours listening to the pain of people of who had survived wondering why they survived and what their life means and what right do they have to survive.

After so many deaths I live and write.

She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

Experience is valuable only when it has brought suffering and when the suffering has left its mark upon both body and mind.

How can you be a survivor, when you can't even remember the war?

Unlike the vast majority of people, I've been locked in a box like an animal and I've also been on the receiving end of bloody thrashings, so I feel uniquely qualified to judge which is worse.

Was it hard? I hope she didn't die hard.' Sethe shook her head. 'Soft as cream. Being alive was the hard part.

We who think we are about to die will laugh at anything.

Well, so it isn't time yet to die, is it?

They were never scared of the kids who might die, or the empty spaces they would leave behind. They were afraid of us-the ones who lived.

We’ve died so many times now that we can only wonder why we still care.

All damaged people are dangerous. Survival makes them so.' 'Why?' 'Because they have no pity. They know what others can survive, as they did.

What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. And there it is... It was death. I chose life.

To die is nothing; but it is terrible not to live.

That was the day my whole world went black. Air looked black. Sun looked black. I laid up in bed and stared at the black walls of my house….Took three months before I even looked out the window, see the world still there. I was surprised to see the world didn’t stop.

It is the same in life: sometimes it is more difficult to make a scene than to die.