Monstrous Quotes - Page 2

• Birth and death - what could be more monstrous than that? We like to deceive ourselves and call it wondrous and beautiful and majestic, but it's freakish, let's face it.

  Rohinton Mistry

  Beautiful, Majestic, Faces

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• What happens to people living in a society where everyone in power is lying, stealing, cheating and killing, and in our hearts we all know this, but the consequences of facing all these lies are so monstrous, we keep on hoping that maybe the corporate government administration and media are on the level with us this time. Americans remind me of survivors of domestic abuse. This is always the hope that this is the very, very, very last time one's ribs get re-broken again.

  Inga Muscio

  Cheating, Lying, Heart

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• To-day we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object's sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

  Oswald Spengler

  Drama, Views, Media

  "The Decline of the West (Volume II)". Book by Oswald Spengler, 1928.

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• I know why people die of hopelessness. It comes on like a thick blanket, covering your thoughts, your confidence, creeping into your mind and filling the corners. I lie in the dark, suffocating under horrible dispare, wishing I were dead. I sleep, then wake, then sleep. The sleep is filled with monstrous dreams that attack, cry out, and vanish, leaving me once more awake and staring into the darkness. Help me! My mind is screaming, but there is no one to hear.

  Joan Lowery Nixon

  Dream, Lying, Sleep

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• When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever

  Tobias Wolff

  Dream, Believe, Fall

  Tobias Wolff (1989). “This boy's life”

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• As is well known, the priests are the most evil enemies—but why? Because they are the most impotent. It is because of their impotence that in them hatred grows to monstrous and uncanny proportions, to the most spiritual and poisonous kind of hatred. The truly great haters in world history have always been priests; likewise the most ingenious haters: other kinds of spirit hardly come into consideration when compared with the spirit of priestly vengefulness.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Spiritual, Atheist, Evil

  Friedrich Nietzsche (2010). “On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo”, p.33, Vintage

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• With that, the poignant charm vanished. Inside the fifth machine, all was rampant malignity. Deformed flowers thrust monstrous horned tusks and trumpets ending in blaring teeth through the crimson walls, rending them; the ravenous garden slavered over its prey and every brick was shown in the act of falling. Amid the violence of this transformation, the oblivion of the embrace went on. The awakened girl, in all her youthful loveliness, still clasped in the arms of a lover from whom all the flesh had fallen. He was a grinning skeleton.

  Angela Carter

  Girl, Wall, Flower

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• All great things must first wear terrifying and monstrous masks, in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Heart, Order, Humanity

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• With the monstrous weapons man already has, humanity is in danger of being trapped in this world by its moral adolescents.

  Omar N. Bradley

  Men, Humanity, World

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• The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.

  John le Carre

  Wise, Cheating, Childhood

  "John le Carre: A man of great intelligence" by Andrew Anthony, www.theguardian.com. October 31, 2009.

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• It seems to me monstrous that anyone should believe that the jazz rhythm expresses America. Jazz rhythm expresses the primitive savage.

  Isadora Duncan

  Dance, Believe, America

  Isadora Duncan (1972). “My Life”, Liveright Publishing Corporation

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• This is pity,” he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

  Ayn Rand

  Feelings, World, Wonder

  Ayn Rand (2011). “Ayn Rand Novel Collection”, p.751, Penguin

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• The government, for example, has determined that black people (somehow) have fewer abilities than white people, and, so, must be given certain preferences. Anyone acquainted with both black and white people knows this assessment is not only absurd but monstrous. And yet it is the law.

  David Mamet

  Black And White, Government, Assessment

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• It is a monstrous thing that I will say, but I will say it all the same: I find in many things more restraint and order in my morals than in my opinions, and my lust less depraved than my reason.

  Michel de Montaigne

  Order, Lust, Opinion

  Michel de Montaigne (1958). “Complete Essays”, p.312, Stanford University Press

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• Man once surrendering his reason, has no remaining guard against absurdities the most monstrous, and like a ship without rudder, is the sport of every wind. With such persons, gullibility, which they call faith, takes the helm from the hand of reason, and the mind becomes a wreck.

  Thomas Jefferson

  Sports, Men, Hands

  Thomas Jefferson (2011). “Jefferson on Freedom: Wisdom, Advice, and Hints on Freedom, Democracy, and the American Way”, p.39, Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

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• I didn't know what hate felt like, not the hate that comes after love. It's huge and desperate and it longs to be proved wrong. And every day it's proved right it grows a little more monstrous. If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once loved, it's for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

  Jeanette Winterson

  Hate, Passion, Needs

  "The Passion". Book by Jeanette Winterson, 1987.

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• The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.

  Graham Greene

  Happiness, Pain, Identity

  Graham Greene (1951). “The End of the Affair”, London Heinemann [1951]

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• What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Believe, Dark, Vanity

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• The huge round lunar clock was a gristmill. Shake down all the grains of Time—the big grains of centuries, and the small grains of years, and the tiny grains of hours and minutes—and the clock pulverized them, slid Time silently out in all directions in a fine pollen, carried by cold winds to blanket the town like dust, everywhere. Spores from that clock lodged in your flesh to wrinkle it, to grow bones to monstrous size, to burst feet from shoes like turnips. Oh, how that great machine…dispensed Time in blowing weathers.

  Ray Bradbury

  Feet, Wrinkles, Dust

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• It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that’s the sin that can’t be forgiven--that I hadn’t done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there’s no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain--and wasted pain...why do they always teach us that it’s easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It’s the hardest thing in the world--to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage.

  Ayn Rand

  Courage, Pain, Dirty

  Ayn Rand (2005). “The Fountainhead”, p.571, Penguin

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• I take it, sir, that you do not approve of our new society." "Approval, sir, in my opinion, demands the attainment of perfection. And in that sense, you rather overrate the charms of your society. I'faith, for one thing, it does seem monstrous ill-dressed for any society, even a new one.

  Baroness Orczy

  Perfection, Doe, Demand

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• It is perfectly monstrous,' he said, at last, 'the way people go about nowadays saying things against one behind one's back that are absolutely and entirely true.

  Oscar Wilde

  Funny, Truth, Gossip

  A Woman of No Importance act 1 (1893)

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• State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all.

  Benito Mussolini

  Party, Mean, Hands

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• It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?

  George Orwell

  Beautiful, Why Not, Body

  George Orwell (1982). “Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four: Text, Sources, Criticism”, Harcourt

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• You know, everyone is always talking about plastic surgery, or the technology, what to do. I really think it's important to help yourself with the technology if you want to feel better, but I am absolutely against any kind of monstrous cuts of the body, lifting that is beyond recognition, this kind of stuff.

  Marina Abramovic

  Cutting, Feel Better, Technology

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