Jack Ketchum

“Fighting for your life is a fucking ball. As long as you didn’t get slaughtered.”

— Jack Ketchum

“The trick of functioning with grief is that of remembering and forgetting all at once. Of letting the ghost walk at your…

— Jack Ketchum

“Friendship and sex were really all she wanted from men these days.”

— Jack Ketchum

“She had always given too much of her life over to relationships, and they’d never quite worked out. Now she was simplifying…

— Jack Ketchum

pain can work form the outside in.

— Jack Ketchum

As though all the world were a bad joke and she was the only one around who knew the punchline.

— Jack Ketchum

“You could grow up every which way, a tree standing tall and straight in an open field or blasted and twisted on…

— Jack Ketchum

“She was grinning and she should have been pretty when she grinned. She had good white teeth and a lovely, delicate mouth.…

— Jack Ketchum

Black coffee’s a lot like whiskey, you know? All devil and no trimmin’s. Always liked my sins pure and take it as…

— Jack Ketchum

“In the basement, with Ruth, I began to learn that anger, hate, fear and loneliness are all one button awaiting the touch…

— Jack Ketchum

“He was a good man and a kind man but he never knew what he wanted. I think that eventually it killed…

— Jack Ketchum

“Bad enough I’m a goddamn burden to myself.”

— Jack Ketchum

“To her eyes, used to diversity, there was a troubling uniformity about them all, something that spoke of isolation, and a dull…

— Jack Ketchum

“It was strange how, when there was nothing else in your life, sex was everything.”

— Jack Ketchum

“I lay in bed and thought how easy it was to hurt a person. It didn’t have to be physical. All you…

— Jack Ketchum

“The life he’d known now seemed capable of multiple, even infinite shatterings.”

— Jack Ketchum

“But I figure passion’s like the wind in the trees out there. Blows hard for a while and feels strong and clean…

— Jack Ketchum

“The dialogue is solo now. I don’t talk. No matter who’s in bed with me I never do. My thoughts slip off…

— Jack Ketchum

“The dead are home before us, daddy, she said. But we have work to do.”

— Jack Ketchum

“Sympathy can turn so quickly. Just add fear. Stir.”

— Jack Ketchum

“You got to tell me the brave captain Why are the wicked so strong? How do the angels get to sleep When…

— Jack Ketchum

“There were so many hidden realities in the world, so many secret lives. It seemed like nobody lived just one.”

— Jack Ketchum