Body Horror Quotes

“I fail to understand why men think violence will intimidate women. Women, who bleed all over themselves every month, who rub blood clots between their fingers and burst them like insects, and sometimes can't because they're not blood clots, they're tongue-coloured strings of meat from the womb. Women who burst open in childbirth, vagina splitting and anus sagging, tiny, hardening fingernails clawing inside of them, placentas like thick filet mignon.”
― Virginia Feito, Victorian Psycho

“Homily professed her love by digging a second crossbow bolt of Shersheshin's body. It was so much clearer a declaration of affection than any of those speeches spun by poets or playwrights. And stuffed into the mouths of actors who pretended to be enamored. One could only pretend to love in language. True love was a woman sinking up to her elbows in her viscera.”
― John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In

“And now Christine felt as if her face was bursting open and glowing coals were being birthed from it, quickening into life and swarming across her face and all her limbs, and everything within her face had sprung to life, a fiery swarming all across her body. In the lightning’s pallid glow she saw, long-legged and venomous, innumerable black spiderlings scurrying down her limbs and out into the night, and as they vanished they were followed, long-legged and venomous, by innumerable others.”
― Jeremias Gotthelf, Die schwarze Spinne

“You know how old people lose all shame about eating, and it makes you puke to watch them? Old junkies are the same about junk. They gibber and squeal at sight of it. The spit hangs off their chin, and their stomach rumbles and all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body’s decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk. Really disgust you to see it. 'Well, my boys will be like that one day,' I thought philosophically. 'Isn’t life peculiar?”
― William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text

“Marking Raxter as hers, and sometimes I think that if she asked, I’d let her to the same to me.”
― Rory Power, Wilder Girls

“How was it that her self's container, her only true protection from the world's elements, had only ever betrayed her, surprised her, and enforced uncertainty and strangeness?”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“Posed In Vein by Stewart Stafford

O Stephanie!
In your cruciform puppetry,
Bloody veins stretched out wiry
To relive in a bondage diary.

Subject mapped as inked skin she wears,
Decorating, desecrating olden snares.
Each needle kiss, a line defined,
A pinprick story rushes her mind.

By candlelight, in her coven deep,
Secrets webbed flies must keep,
Spelled out straight in her hexing book,
Consort Lenore gives a cryptic look.

They tug the strings, the marionette,
Caught in her captor's welcome net.
In artificial light, a social moth's mien,
A wrought, posed, fetishistic scene.

The knots are tight, the ropes defined;
Bodily and in private mind.
This mutual art, a supplicant's plea,
Cut into her Kinbaku diary.

© 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“The definition of body is buried.”
― Stephanie M. Wytovich, The Apocalyptic Mannequin

“He told me—it was like a dream.” The story unspools in chunks and gasps, wet noises caked with pain. “He told me, he— this was supposed to be beautiful. Like being reborn. Like giving birth. Like creating life. But this is—”
“Wrong.” I finish.
“It hurts.”
― Cassandra Khaw, Hammers on Bone

“They stare at white skin, all droopy and soggy like a roll of toilet paper soaking in a sink has been wrapped around it.”
― B.A. Bellec, Pulse

“The beast resembles a bear, or at least something that might have been a bear a few days ago.”
― B.A. Bellec, Pulse

“[You forgot] the importance of the lopsided, the thing that's skewed a little. You were looking for balance, beautiful balance, equal parts, equal sides. I know this. I know you. But you should have been tracking the yen in its tics and quirks. The little quirk. The misshape...That's where the answer was, in your body, in your prostate.”
― Don DeLillo, Cosmopolis

“She reached out a long, elegant finger and traced over the beads. The roots in my neck curled with pleasure, and I fought the urge to shiver.”
― Laura Steven, The Society For Soulless Girls

“While his body rearranged itself, Lewis could do nothing but helplessly bear witness to the process.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“Afterward, as those in attendance sifted through their own junk drawer of troubles, they would thank the tilted universe it wasn't their change to bear; their blood and bones ripping away from humanity's known, narrow lane; their life and family broken and rearranged.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“There was something tragic in that sloppy and immoderate fertility: the misery of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death; the strange heroism of a femininity triumphant in its fecundity over the deformity of nature and the insufficiency of man. Yet her progeny revealed the cause of that maternal panic, that frenzy of birthing that had exhausted itself in abortive foetuses and an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.”
― Bruno Schulz, Nocturnal Apparitions: Essential Stories

“He imagined what it must feel like to have mouths opening in your very flesh, gaping in a tongueless susurrus. When the eyes boiled out of the gashes, could you see what they saw? Did they give you a new appreciation of the lethality of light?”
― Yoon Ha Lee, Revenant Gun

“The sick feeling in his gut was either despair or his colon sloughing off its lining.”
― James S.A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes

“My body was a wax shell. A frozen thing. I could move, but I didn’t belong in it. I was watching myself collapse.”
― Jonathan Harnisch, Sex, Drugs, and Schizophrenia

“I'm obsessed with taking care of you, Penny. And your nails don't stop growing.”
― Iain Reid, We Spread

“Look at you, young miss Dorothy,” Sennin said, hissing, “You are rotting almost completely. Limping and stumbling with each step.”
Sennin slithers to Dorothy, going by her shoulder, “Please, go back to your room.”
Dorothy has a frown, but because she is focused on the next door. Limping through it.”
― Kolter Sands, Tomiétrèla

“Hands extending, arms elongating, eyes enlarging, and crevices opening. Decaying. Jumping and leaping through each sand body she leaves behind. Ending. Starting. Door. Another Door. Wooden. Number.”
― Kolter Sands, Tomiétrèla

“This City," I thought, "is so horrific that its mere existence, the mere fact of its having endured — even in the middle of a secret desert — pollutes the past and the future and somehow compromises the stars. So long as this City endures, no one in the world can ever be happy or courageous." I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull pullulating with teeth, organs, and heads monstrously yoked together yet hating each other — those might, perhaps, be approximate images.”
― Jorge Luis Borges , El inmortal

“I got a whole mouth in my vagina and there's nothing you can do about it.”
― Hailey Piper, Queen of Teeth

“I am what you made me. Now you're going to regret it.”
― Hailey Piper, Queen of Teeth

“The body would never be completely stable, but she was vicious where it counted. An anatomical mess, a beauty of blood and teeth and tentacles.”
― Hailey Piper, Queen of Teeth