Top 35 Nick Cutter Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “How do you make a hormone?” “How?” “You refuse to pay her.”

— Nick Cutter

2. “If you call the tune, you also have to pay the piper when he begs his due.”

— Nick Cutter

3. “Your child doesn’t owe you loyalty or obedience. You owe your child love and understanding, owe it unconditionally, and if you love them strongly enough, eventually that love may be returned.”

— Nick Cutter

4. “It’s all so goddamn fragile. Your life and the thread you carry it on. And the more love you carry, the more stress you put on that thread, the better chance it will snap. But what choice do any of us have? You take on that love because to live without it is to exist as half a person. You give that love away because it is in you to give, not out of a desire for recompense. And you keep loving even when the world cracks open and reveals a black hole where all that love can get swallowed.”

— Nick Cutter

5. “Well, time works differently down here, boss. Sometimes I feel like I’ve lived a thousand lifetimes... it’s funny. The pain is constant. Sometimes it’s so much that I can’t stand it. I bite at myself, tear my skin off, but I can never quite die. Like I said, funny. But to hurt is to love, right?”

— Nick Cutter

6. “I’m just saying that sometimes the more you care for something, the more damage you do. Not on purpose, right? You end up hurting the things you love just because you’re trying so hard.”

— Nick Cutter

7. “Newton was unfailingly kind and polite, read books, and made obvious attempts at self-betterment – the equivalent of an air-raid siren blaring in a tranquil neighborhood: NEeeeerd-AleeeRT! NEeeeerd-AleeeRT!”

— Nick Cutter

8. “The past had a perfection that the future could never hold.”

— Nick Cutter

9. “You hold on to life until it gets ripped away from you. Even if it gets ripped away in pieces. You just hold on.”

— Nick Cutter

10. “He would wonder at their fates. Such a strange path to chart. The heart pulls, the mind resists. The heart wins. It wins. Nobody can chart the shape of his or her life before that shape emerges. There is hardly any rhyme to that shape and almost no reason. And that is the grandest, the most irreducible mystery of all.”

— Nick Cutter

11. “Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.”

— Nick Cutter

12. “An expression crossed its face that in the embalmed moonlight could have passed for sorrow. The thing was revolted at itself for what it was – what it couldn’t help but be. But aren’t we all prisoners of our natures, deep down?”

— Nick Cutter

13. “They wanted answers. Which was all people like them ever wanted. Any answers at all, so they didn’t have to think on their own.”

— Nick Cutter

14. “They’d made a pact to be friends forever, but forever could be so, so brief.”

— Nick Cutter

15. “Do you know how hard it is to kill something? Nothing wants to die. Things cling to their lives against all hope, even when it’s hopeless. It’s like the end is always there, you can’t escape it, but things try so, so hard not to cross that finish line. So when they finally do, everything’s been stripped away. Their bodies and happiness and hope.”

— Nick Cutter

16. “Prepare the lifeboats, mates! The SS Sanity is capsizing! We’re going down!”

— Nick Cutter

17. “Life was too damn tough on its own terms to go depriving yourself further.”

— Nick Cutter

18. “If there was one thing he wanted to tell his lost friends, it was that lots of adults didn’t have a goddamn clue. It was one of the sadder facts he’d had to come to grips with. Adults could be just as stupid as kids. Stupider even, because often they didn’t have to answer to anybody.”

— Nick Cutter

19. “It’s love. Love is the absolute killer. Care. The milk of human kindness. People try so hard to save the people the love they end up catching the contagion themselves. They give comfort, deliver aid, and in doing so they acquire the infection. Then those people are cared for by others and they get infected. On and on it goes. He shrugs. But that’s people. People care too much. They love at all costs. And so they pay the ultimate price.”

— Nick Cutter

20. “This out-of-body feeling that you’ve stepped away from the path your species has always tread. Things become dreamlike, essential, Your mind, seeking solace in the familiar, retreats to those things you understand, but those things become so much harder to grasp.”

— Nick Cutter

21. “They say cockroaches will be the last things left on earth after a nuclear holocaust. Don’t believe it. The last thing on earth will be a worm in the guts of those cockroaches, sucking them dry.”

— Nick Cutter

22. “Have you ever heard a newborn cry as it awakes from a nightmare?” the Long Walker asked. Petty was too stunned by its question to reply. “A newborn, only a few days old,” it went on. “They have nightmares, but not as you would understand. Their minds are unformed, as was your own at that age. A newborn baby can still see the world behind the world, you see? The world where my daddy lives, and me and a few others like us. They can still see us. That’s why they scream as they do.”

— Nick Cutter

23. “They were slick with the kind of adrenal perspiration that squeezes from the pores like the sweat off foreign cheese.”

— Nick Cutter

24. “Good men die in wretched agony and bad men die happily in their beds. Creatures live and die never knowing love.”

— Nick Cutter

25. “There is an emotion that operates on a register above sheer terror. It lives on a mindless dog-whistle frequency. Its existence is in itself a horrifying discovery: like scanning a shortwave radio in the dead of night and tuning in to an alien wavelength – a heavy whisper barely climbing above the static, voices muttering in a brutal language that human tongues could never speak.”

— Nick Cutter

26. “The night’s silence stretched over the immensity of the ocean – an impossibly quiet vista that stirred fear in Max’s heart. Would death be like that: endless liquid silence?”

— Nick Cutter

27. “Luke hissed, a release of pent-up anger and fear, and gave it a kick, which only sent a spike of pain shooting up to his knee.”

— Nick Cutter

28. “Amos Flesher struck her as many men of the cloth had done over the years: a bully who had learned to fight with scripture rather than his fists.”

— Nick Cutter

29. “Fear is just weakness exiting the body.”

— Nick Cutter

30. “Fear finds a home in you. It finds the softest spots imaginable and sets up residence.”

— Nick Cutter

31. “The dream drained from his brainpan, thick as syrup.”

— Nick Cutter

32. “You know what my sister said to me once? She said that maybe the best thing about having a child, especially a young one, was that you could love that child shamelessly. She said that you could put everything into that kid, love crazily, give everything in your heart and mind and soul over to that other person. You can’t do that for a husband or a wife, not really. The only other entity you could love that way would be God, if you’re a believer.”

— Nick Cutter

33. “He couldn’t get a grip on his sudden fear: it slipped through the safety bars of his mind and threaded – wormed – into the shadowy pockets where nightmares grew.”

— Nick Cutter

34. “It was as if the man had awoken from a terrible dream only to find that those terrors were dwarfed by those in the waking world.”

— Nick Cutter

35. “The detritus of animal and plant life that had died miles above. It fell steadily through each zone of the ocean, down and down, shredding into flakes, leached of pigment until it became bone white. A snow of death.”

— Nick Cutter

36. “Getting teased your whole life must force you to grow some pretty hard bark.”

— Nick Cutter