Matthew Stokoe > Quotes

“Our hearts are only two pounds, not much room for love.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“Fuck no, that stuff just comes from food. The real poison comes out of your head. All your fuck-ups and sadnesses and fears drop down like some sort of brainshit into your guts and build up there. That's what really fucks you up. I told you before.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“The voice called his name again and it came through a lot of throat. Steven twisted quickly on his stool.
Just a white wall and, down near the floor, the ventilation grille. Then movement behind the grille and Steven was on his knees, peering through it, pressing his face against the mesh. In there, in the shadows beyond the spill of light from the hall, the outline of an anvil-shaped head swayed gently.
Two eyes blinked limpidly, insolent in their slowness. A dark mass moved forward into the light.
“That Cripps man is going to fuck you up, dude.”
It was a cow. Most of the body was below floor level but Steven could tell it was a full grown animal. A sienna Guernsey. He looked closely at the flawless sandy curves of forehead and cheek, at the chocolate darkening of the mouth and nostrils, at the badger rings around the eyes. For an absurd second he thought that if he looked hard enough at it the thing might phase back into his head and disappear.
But it was real and it stayed.
“What … ?”
“Yeah, I’m a cow, man. Touch me.”
Steven stuck his fingers through the grille. The cow was a cow, warm and solid.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“He was adrift in their world, unsure of his significance, and to open himself to a point where conversation could take place would only have revealed how unlike them he was. Cripps”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“I slept and the night rolled over into day like a dog. Another post-meridian awakening - sunshine on empty bottles, tangled clothes. I dozed while the temperature rose.”
― Matthew Stokoe, High Life

“I'd done it, I'd crossed the line between accepted behavior and behavior most of the population would consider a lynching offense, and that morning I felt as real as any of the men in the Escape commercials. It had been dirty and nasty but I wanted more.”
― Matthew Stokoe, High Life

“The Guernsey’s eyes were deep and brown and Steven knew that the curl of its lips was a small cow smile.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“He parked his car carefully, made sure he'd set all the locks and the alarm. On the steps he kept looking behind him, snapping glances into shadows like he expected this to be a set-up with my gang waiting to roll him. Nervous. But I got this feeling the possibility of danger was all part of it for him. What he wanted was something with an edge to it, something stamped as unmistakable bad.

Welcome to the club, dude.”
― Matthew Stokoe, High Life

“I am not teaching you to destroy men, but to become like them.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“She would need someone to cling to , someone to absorb and deaden the impacting horror of her sentence. And to justify this dependence she would have to call it love”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“Until he was destroyed by an unbearable level of contact with a world he longed for but was unable to enter”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“And to justify this dependence she would have to call it love.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“He was adrift in their world, unsure of his significance, and to open himself to a point where conversation could take place would only have revealed how unlike them he was.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“Yeah, I'm a cow, man. Touch me.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“Yeah, I'm a cow, man. Can you handle it?”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“where the air was guilty with knowledge of the killing out back,”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“Meat doesn't have the brains. It just works till it dies or until someone cuts it up.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“From the second she had squirted him from her cunt they had loathed each other.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“His head, though, was greedy for change and, not knowing the correct path to take, but unable to pass up a chance at happiness, slipped into neutral and waited for the decision to be made for it.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“They moved for no reason but to block out thought because thinking, remembering the liberation of exerting an influence on their world for the first time, was an emotion too potent to bear without some kind of outlet.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“Jewels if actual experience to be taken home and gloated over.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“What did it matter if they loved each other or not as long as each could be used as a screen against the world?”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“The only thing I saw up close was the heart. They weigh six pounds, you know. It was still beating when I held it, like it was trying to suck something in. But it stopped in the end." Lucy looked suddenly tired. "Our hearts are only two pounds, not much room for love.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“A world of men that does not play home to fear.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“When a man is truly free, he is capable of anything that serves him.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“If meaning is what you need, you'll have ample opportunity to search for it.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“They were so much more real than himself, the air around them was bright with the definition of their existence.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“We're trying to hide inside each other. We called it love to pretend we were normal”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows

“The heart wanted them to live and it cheered on its team with the unshakeable, endlessly enduring love of TV parents.”
― Matthew Stokoe, COWS

“Parents destroy their children simply by their presence.”
― Matthew Stokoe, Cows