“It was like discovering that your innermost fires and terrors, the things you believed no one else could fathom, were in fact the basis of a recognized philosophy. Some part of you felt intimately invaded, threatened; some other part fell to its knees and sobbed in gratitude that it was no longer alone.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“I'm your nightmare. Did you think you were done with nightmares, now you've become one?”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“Never relinquish your terrors. That's when they catch you.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“I press my hands against my chest, wishing I could somehow be even closer to him. I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“Horror is the badge of humanity, worn proudly, self-righteously, and often falsely.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“And what was I if not death's ghostwriter?”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“Ah, relationships. If he was lucky, Luke thought, he would never have another one.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“But if I die without trying again, I'm a coward. I don't mind having regrets about stuff I've done. It's the regrets about stuff I haven't done that bother me.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, quote from Exquisite Corpse
“I gave you up once. It killed me. it was figuratively but it still killed me. I’m not doin’ that shit again.”
― Kristen Ashley, quote from Creed
“Hey - Duggie! Duggie! Duggie!" He came running up to me, sparkler in hand. I felt like sticking one on him, the cheeky bastard. Nobody called me Duggie.
He held the sparkler up in front of my face and said, "Wait. Wait."
I was already waiting. What else was there to do?
"Here you are," he said. "Look! What's this?"
At that precise moment, his sparkler fizzled out. I didn't say anything, so he supplied the answer himself. "The death of the socialist dream," he said.
He giggled like a little maniac, and stared at me for a second or two before running off, and in that time I saw exactly the same thing I'd seen in Stubbs's eyes the day before. The same triumphalism, the same excitement, not because something new was being created, but because something was being destroyed. I thought about Phillip and his stupid rock symphony and I swear that my eyes pricked with tears. This ludicrous attempt to squeeze the history of the countless millennia into half an hour's worth of crappy riffs and chord changes suddenly seemed no more Quixotic than all the things my dad and his colleagues had been working towards for so long. A national health service, free to everyone who needed it. Redistribution of wealth through taxation. Equality of opportunity. Beautiful ideas, Dad, noble aspirations, just as there was the kernel of something beautiful in Philip's musical hodge-podge. But it was never going to happen. If there had ever been a time when it might have happened, that time was slipping away. The moment had passed. Goodbye to all that.
Easy to be clever with hindsight, I know, but I was right, wasn't I? Look back on that night from the perspective of now, the closing weeks of the closing century of our second millennium - if the calendar of some esoteric and fast-disappearing religious sect counts for anything any more - and you have to admit that I was right. And so was Benjamin's brother, the little bastard, with his sparkler and his horrible grin and that nasty gleam of incipient victory in his twelve-year-old eyes. Goodbye to all that, he was saying. He'd worked it out already. He knew what the future held in store.”
― Jonathan Coe, quote from The Rotters' Club
“How generous the universe could be, when he wanted to be!”
― Cassandra Clare, quote from The Runaway Queen
“Politics are for the Washington, D.C., policy makers who safely watched the action on a video monitor from thousands of miles away.”
― quote from No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden
“That's all there is to it. We look different, so we don't understand each other's inner thoughts, but we cherish each other in our own way. I respect you.”
― Sun-mi Hwang, quote from The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly
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