Monstrous Quotes

“She was hot. You could take a poll, write a book, break down all the reasons, the intellectual and physical gifts that shaped her personality, and whatever that intangible part was. Write poems about it, document it all in photos and movies, try to stay woke, but the reality was, what it all came back to, she was hot.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“There might be some lost tribe somewhere on the planet who hadn’t been exposed to the movies and books of the genre, but these eight men—Mills was the oldest at 28—had grown up in a world where reanimated dead who shambled along eating brains were part of the fabric of everyday life. Where zombie movies equated to drinking games, late night laughs, and getting laid.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“He’d seen combat and had been through two divorces, hadn’t thought of himself as a fearful man. But that was ten minutes ago.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“She circled and rolled the pan, making sure to seal and burn the ragged edges. Pleased to discover the smell of his burning flesh wasn’t that much different than the bacon.”
― William Kely McClung, LOOP

“…how monstrous the people you loved could be.”
― Marisha Pessl, Night Film

“He must have been handsome when he was alive and was handsome still, although made monstrous by his pallor and her awareness of what he was. His mouth looked soft, his cheekbones as sharp as blades, and his jaw curved, giving him an off-kilter beauty. His black hair a mad forest of dirty curls.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“That was seven years ago. The doctors told her father the memory would fade, like the big messy scar on her arm, but neither ever did.”
― Holly Black, The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“I was going to remember, or discover, where everything came from. I was going to do the subtle, monstrous thing where you figured out what you were doing, and why.”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“Tana would sit near the door to the basement with fingers in her ears, tears and snot running down her face as she cried and cried and cried. And little Pearl would toddle up, crying, too. They cried while they ate their cereal, cried while they watched cartoons, and cried themselves to sleep at night, huddled together in Tana's little bed. 'Make her stop' Pearl said, but Tana couldn't.”
― Holly Black , The Coldest Girl in Coldtown

“Demons are a very human creation. You look for ways to explain evil, and instead of seeing it in yourselves, you offload the responsibility onto monsters. The monstrous exists in the mirror, not in the sulfurous depths of some fantasy world.”
― Kelley Armstrong, Deceptions

“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

“If I’m a monster, mademoiselle, it’s because man’s cruelty has made me so.”
― Rachel L. Demeter, Beauty of the Beast: A Dark Beauty and the Beast Retelling

“Simpson, the student of divinity, it was who arranged his conclusions probably with the best, though not most scientific, appearance of order. Out there, in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men: when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon 'savage and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of men, not evil perhaps in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity as it exists.'

("The Wendigo")”
― Algernon Blackwood, Monster Mix

“...you lifted the veil when you admitted you had no memory of that day - it was so special and your lack of recall so monstrous...”
― John Geddes, A Familiar Rain

“Few things are sadder than the truly monstrous.”
― Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

“Success without integrity is always fleeting, or monstrous.”
― Bryant McGill, Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life

“Sometimes one has got to become monstrous in order to survive.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince

“Because,” Sam said fiercely, “as a wise woman once told me, men are entirely too quick to call a woman mad or monstrous just because she can do something they can’t. Don’t do it for them.”
― Susan J. Morris, Strange Beasts

“No: such a martyrdom would be monstrous.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“More and more uncomfortable did Humbert feel. It was something quite special, that feeling: an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

“All desire, Tracy had had occasion since to think, is to some degree monstrous.”
― Paul Russell, The Coming Storm

“The apotheosis of the controlling mind is monstrous and terrifying.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Stick creatures, enormous and terrible, huge spiders made of brambles and branches. Monstrous things with gaping mouths, their bodies of burned and blackened bark, their teeth of stone and ice. Mortal body parts visibly part of them, as though someone took apart people like they were dolls and glued them back together in awful shapes.”
― Holly Black, The Stolen Heir

“Compared to the routine, more coarse, carving of the Apostles and Elders, the monstrous rout seems to have been produced by a more expert sculptor, suggesting a scale of value that did not elevate the Divine archetype over the debased animal.”
― Michael Camille, Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art

“If there are gods to listen, they are monstrous gods who torment us for their sport. Who else would make a world like this, so full of bondage, blood, and pain? Who else would shape us as they have?”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“Suicide creates a monstrous emotional upsurge of shame and guilt. Everyone participates in feeling responsible and even shamed at knowing the suicidal candidate. If these feelings are not healed the vampire of suicidal death can strike again and again.”
― Linda Lee Landon, Life After Suicide

“Valley of the Damned
Ch. One:
Dark Storm Rising

’Tis said giants grapple in the Earth so deep,
To contend for souls that they might keep.”
― douglas laurent