Grotesque Quotes

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“In order to induce the process of decay, water is necessary. I think that, in the case of women, men are the water.”
― Natsuo Kirino, Grotesque

“I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.”
― Charles Baudelaire, Intimate Journals

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“We could go so far as to say that it is the human condition to be grotesque, since the human animal is the one that does not fit in, the freak of nature who has no place in the natural order and is capable of re-combining nature's products into hideous new forms.”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

“Well, then,' the Cat went on, 'you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“Our fiction is not merely in flight from the physical data of the actual world…it is, bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, nonrealistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic – a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation…our classic [American] literature is a literature of horror for boys”
― Leslie Fielder

“But if it so happens ... a work ... under pain of otherwise becoming shameful or false, requires fantasy ... [and that] certain limbs or elements of a figure are altered by borrowing from other species, for example transforming into a dolphin the hinder end of a griffon or a stag ... these alterations will be excellent and the substitution, however unreal it may seem, deserves to be declared a fine invention in the genre of the monstrous.

When a painter introduces into this kind of work of art chimerae and other imaginary beings in order to divert and entertain the senses and also to captivate the eyes of mortals who long to see unclassified and impossible things, he shows himself more respectful of reason than if he produced the usual figures of men or of animals.”
― Michaelangelo

“I had always believed that the very best food contains something elementally repugnant. That its innate grotesquerie is what makes it so perversely alluring. My own favorite foods tended toward a certain sludgy, muddy texture. And from the most expensive and genteel through to the indulgently crass, the appeal of slop abides: caviar, escargots, foie gras or hamburgers, kebabs, macaroni and cheese. Even vegetable soup forms a membrane. Apples begin rotting from the very first bite. No matter which end of the spectrum, there lies fundamentally and yet delectably disgusting, some squirmy, sinewy, oozing, greasy, sticky, glutinous, mushy, fatty, chewy, viscous thing that compels. The line between pleasure and revulsion can seem so very thin, if it even exists at all.”
― Lara Williams, Supper Club

“And as for that strangeness in your gut, that comes from you, not the Lord. When you were a child you had worms. As likely as not you have them again.”
― Flannery O'Connor, The Violent Bear It Away

“The extent of God’s grace always eclipses the extent of my grotesqueness. Therefore, I can never be bad enough for God to tell me that He’s had enough.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream.”
― Catherine Lacey, The Answers

“He pictures amputated human arms flopping like fish down the center of the road; syringes floating on beds of liposuctioned fat; gelatinous human eyeballs wiggling merrily as they roll down the highway; and so on. He could imagine other such grotesque stuff, but chooses not to.”
― Dan Chaon, Stay Awake

“The splendor of the salmon canapés radiant with mayonnaise disappears, swallowed by the dark shopping bags of the customers. Certainly every one of these men and women knows exactly what he wants, heads straight for his objective with a decisiveness admitting no hesitancy; and rapidly he dismantles mountains of vol-au-vents, white puddings, cervelats.
Mr. Palomar would like to catch in their eyes some reflection of those treasures' spell, but the faces and actions are only impatient and hasty, of people concentrated on themselves, nerves taut, each concerned with what he has and what he does not have. Nobody seems to him worthy of the Pantagruelic glory that unfolds in those cases, on the counters. A greed without joy or youth drives them; and yet a deep, atavistic bond exists between them and those foods, their consubstance, flesh of their flesh.”
― Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar

“If something is ugly, it’s likely that it’s only ugly because it’s never been given the opportunity to be beautiful. And never having had that opportunity is likely the ugliest thing of all.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“In principio, quando il mondo era giovane, c'erano molti pensieri ma non esisteva nulla si simile a una verità. Le verità le fabbricò l'uomo, e ogni verità fu composta da un grande numero di pensieri imprecisi. Così in tutto il mondo ci furono verità. Ed erano meravigliose. Il vecchio aveva elencato nel suo libro centinaia di verità. Io non cercherò di riferirvele tutte. C'erano la verità della verginità e la verità della passione, la verità della ricchezza e quella della povertà, della modestia e dello sperpero, dell'indifferenza e dell'entusiasmo. Centinaia e centinaia erano le verità, e tutte meravigliose. Poi veniva la gente. Ognuno, appena compariva, si gettava su una delle verità e se ne impadroniva; alcuni, molto forti, arrivavano a possederne una dozzina contemporaneamente. Erano le verità a trasformare la gente in caricature grottesche. Il vecchio aveva una sua complessa teoria a questo proposito. Era sua opinione che quando qualcuno s'impadroniva di una verità, e diceva che quella era la sua verità e si sforzava di vivere secondo essa, allora costui si trasformava in una caricatura, e la verità che abbracciava in una menzogna.”
― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

“It was as if they had made themselves deliberately grotesque.”
― Adam Nevill, Apartment 16

“Intimidation," she told me, amused by my repulsion.

"Men abandon battle when they see their own fates in these ruined faces”
― Rin Chupeco

“There are those among the Folk so hideous that all living things shrink back in horror. And yet others have a grotesquerie so exaggerated, so voluptuous, that it comes all the way around to beauty”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“Every nail, claw-scale and spur, every spike
and welt on the hand of that heathen brute
was like barbed steel.”
― Seamus Heaney, Beowulf A New Verse Translation Hardcover

“I know, you were much closer to the painter than any of us. In spite of that, your lips, too, will want to curl up into a smile. There are levels of tragedy whose mind-numbing properties can only be checked by laughter, and what story does not contain an inkling of the grotesque? When we Germans will have learnt to laugh like the Gauls, we will truly be the rulers of this earth; even more so than before, one might add."

"John Hamilton Llewellyn's End”
― Hanns Heinz Ewers, Nachtmahr: Strange Tales

“Why is it only now that I can see how many ordinary things are actually grotesque?”
― Sara Baume, A Line Made By Walking

“Cine şi-a văzut figura în ipostaza grotescă nu se va putea uita niciodată, fiindcă se va teme totdeauna de el însuşi. Disperarea este urmată de o nelinişte extrem de chinuitoare. Şi ce face acest grotesc altceva decît să actualizeze şi să intensifice teama şi neliniştea?”
― Emil M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

“Grief is a form of growth that in gradual excess becomes graphic and grotesque.”
― Criss Jami

“Englezul e mare politician. Își vîră nasul peste tot. Toată lumea știe că, atunci când Anglia trage tabac pe-o nară, Franța strănută.”
― Emil Iordache, Nikolai Gogol

“Englezul e mare politician. Își vîră nasul peste tot. Toată lumea știe că, atunci când Anglia trage tabac pe-o nară, Franța strănută. - "Însemnările unui nebun”
― Nikolai Gogol

“Englezul e mare politician. Își vîră nasul peste tot. Toată lumea știe că, atunci când Anglia trage tabac pe-o nară, Franța strănută.

- extras din "Însemnările unui nebun”
― Nikolai Gogol

“The world has always been unsettled by things that don’t match—beauty and ugliness side by side, the grotesque tangled with the pure.”
― Alma Brooke, Four of a Kind

“The exhibition of grotesqueness exhibits the wounded body openly to the world, to show it and sign it so that only its author can claim its authority.”
― Hanan Jasim Khammas, Writing Through the Body: Iraqi Responses to the War on Terror