Collected Quotes from The Cipher by Kathe Koja

1/3/2026

art by yours truly.

Happy New Year, my pretties.

I just finished up reading The Cipher by Kathe Koja (1991), a short horror(?) novel about a young alcoholic poet (Nicholas) who discovers a Hole (the Funhole) in the storage room of his apartment building. The Funhole brings terrifying metamorphoses upon anything that enters it, and it calls to Nicholas, who also happens to be in love with a beautiful, toxic, batshit crazy woman (Nakota). Nicholas becomes the unwitting prophet of the Funhole, introducing its horrors to his cadre of artist frenemies.

The Cipher’s prose is meticulous, reality-bending, and often very funny, and the characters Koja introduces are, well, unique—weird artist types who dare too close to the sun. Well, the Funhole. Don’t go near the Funhole. Unless it starts flirting with you via strange smells and telling you that you should upend your entire life for it. Then you should definitely go near the Funhole.

Lots of preternatural bodily fluids and pathetic yearning in this one, fellas. I recommend completely to fans of modern weird fiction and body horror. It will break your brain in a poignant sort of way.

While I was reading The Cipher, I listened to Katatonia (Swedish death-doom metal) and And One (horny German industrial synth-pop).

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I have collected my 15 favorite quotes from The Cipher. No spoilers.

1. “Ah God, the happy hells I can create, you too, all of us.” (19)

   1. Nice little soundbite, very fitting for the novel as a (w)hole. Haha.

2. “I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me…take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.” (27)

3. “Read your own poems, I told myself, and smiled, a thin scoff. I still wrote them, or rather found them written; I rarely remembered the act of writing since I was usually shitfaced when I did it.” (28)

   1. Real.

4. “…a very small part of me was banging its head in frustration and terror against the furry walls of my great and perfect drunkenness…” (64)

   1. This is what I mean. “Furry” is an unexpected yet entirely appropriate, precise adjective for, you know, being sloshed.

5. “‘…all I want to do is go home and take a shit and go to bed, okay?’” (68)

   1. Again, real.

6. “I was so tired of hating myself. But I was so good at it, it was such a comfortable way to be, goddamn fucking flotsam on the high seas, the low tide, a little wad of nothing shrugging and saying Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean it…” (73)

7. “…above her bed a shitty-looking plaque…: ‘When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade.’ Well, life had given me shit, and I was making a compost heap.” (76)

   1. This is the type of humor throughout The Cipher: desolate and clever.

8. “…I could hear music… a whisper in my bones. Maddeningly beautiful. [A]nd as faint as an insect choir, like standing in the dark and glimpsing—the barest peripheral, an image behind your eyelids—the passing of your one desire, close enough to nuzzle if you could only fix its motion, see it all the way.” (99)

9. “The hallway was cold, but the odor of the storage room was ripe and welcoming as a womb, and with embarrassed pleasure I slipped inside…” (113)

   1. Talk about yonic imagery.

10. “…something was eating at me, something stroking my bones from the inside out and there was no cure for that but to give in, give over, crawl headfirst and [let it] kill me, fuck me, I don’t care.” (123)

    1. SubStack, we’ve all been there, right? Right.

11. “[I was] no longer even nominally hungry but definitely sick. Sick around the edges.” (157)

    1. Specific and very effective.

12. “The smiling face of nothing.” (170)

13. “Sometimes, I thought, it would be worth it to die, just to stop hearing that voice. Like an ache in the ear, like a bad tooth audibly rotting. Like a cancer that talks.” (189)

    1. “Now I want to sit back and relax, when, all of a sudden, I hear this AGGRAVATING, GRATING voice…” (Abby Lee Miller)

14. “…telling the beads of her sweat like some strange rosary, her head hunched down and eyes closed like fists…” (209)

    1. Absolute Prose right here.

15. “What if somehow I’m crawling blind and headfirst into my own sick heart, the void made manifest and disguised as a hellhole, to roil in the aching stink of my own emptiness forever?” (216)

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I liked this novel. Quite a lot! If you’re into the same flavor of freak shit as I, then be sure to check it out.