Gritty Reads Quotes

“Sorrow is also a terrible weapon of destruction, one that kills from the inside out.”
― Michael Zboray, Teenagers War: Vietnam 1969

“If there was Armageddon tomorrow? Well, then all those school-goers would be the unschooled and I’d be in my element. Survival is all about circumstances and who’s prepared for the current situation”
― Eleni Hale, Stone Girl

“Saturday morning. Hung-over as fuck. The beer fear squirms through my belly with alien tendrils and I know with absolute certainty that I have done something unforgivable.

Something apocalyptic.

Again.”
― Michael Taljaard, The Transkei Run: and the Times of High Strangeness

“He may have put me on a ‘trial’, but the only thing he was trialling was my fucking patience, which was diminishing the closer I got to finishing the donuts.”
― Holly Bloom, Killer Candy

“Campbell Road, so he had been told by long-serving colleagues, and some of The Bunk’s inhabitants, was home to the most notorious criminals: thieves, prostitutes, fraudsters – every sort of rogue and vagabond drifted through this slum. Unbelievable as it seemed to Franks, some had settled and been resident a very long while. If a couple of women – one who looked like she’d had seven bells beaten out of her – wanted to set about a well-known brass, it didn’t take a genius to work out that one of their old men was playing away. Bickerstaff might be a stickler for doing things by the book but, in the great scheme of things, this was a petty domestic incident. The Bunk community had its own system of justice. Franks agreed with it: leave them be to shovel up their own shit.”
― Kay Brellend, The Street

“I’m not asking for you to accept my dream as truth. You asked what came to me as I slept, and now I’ve told you. Knowing the future doesn’t make you wise, Hacom. It only gives you a glimpse of what might come to pass. What you do with that knowledge is what reveals the worth of a man.”
Aaron-Michael Hall, The Rise of Nazil”
― Aaron-Michael Hall, The Rise of Nazil

“Show me,” I said softly, and stroked his hair. “Show me what it feels like, to be wanted by a man, the way you want me.”
― Cara McKenna, Hard Time

“I sigh, peering out of the window. We’re far out of central
London now and I scan the streets, trying to get my bearings. We’re
getting nearer to Julian’s resting place. I recognise an old police station, converted into cheap flats. This part of London feels darker
than Mayfair. It’s as though the streetlights don’t shine as brightly.
Cheaper models, not as many. I like it. Every time I come here, on
a certain level, I relax. It almost feels more like home than Mayfair.
Mayfair is who I want to be, Hayes is who I am. My veins are the
dark streets, pulsing with traffic. There’s wreckage all around: craterous potholes, crumpled railings, abandoned cars, derelict homes.
Nothing’s ever repaired. It’s all broken. The poverty’s inescapable.
The air perpetually stinks.”
― Zoe Rosi, Pretty Evil

“Maybe, just maybe, with each other's help, they have a chance of overcoming the trials put in front of them.”
― Holly Webb