Body Horror Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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