any quotes about just like… horror
Ted Hughes, from Gaudete and From Crow's Account of St George
"His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat."
— Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; from ‘The Bloody Chamber’
"I'll have your heart, if not by gift my knife / Shall carve it out. I'll have your heart, your life."
— Stevie Smith, from ‘Tender Only to One’
"What awaited me / in the land of the living? / His hand creeping starved / between my thighs? / The sweet stench of rot / choking itself in my hair?"
— Emily Palermo, from 'Eurydice'
"The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the room’s four corners are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pungent fumes of incense. In the centre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long candles in enormous silver candlesticks. In a white lace négligé stained a little with blood, the Countess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each morning and lies down in an open coffin."
— Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; from ‘The Lady of the House of Love’
"Now I could raise / Her dead, dark body to my own / And hear the joyous rustle of her bone / And in her eyes see deathly blaze;
Now could I wake / To passion after death, and taste / The rapture of her hating, tear the waste / Of body. Break, her dead, dark body, break."
— Dylan Thomas, The Notebook Poems 1930–34: Poems from the story, ‘The Fight’
"I stood and watched your wretched Dance of Death / And vomited my heart out through my teeth"
— Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil; from 'A Voyage to Cythera'
"Why do the lilies goggle their tongues at me / When I pluck them; / And writhe, and twist, / And strangle themselves against my fingers, / So that I can hardly weave the garland / For your hair / Why do they shriek your name / And spit at me / When I would / cluster them? / Must I kill them / To make them lie still, / And send you a wreath of lolling corpses / To turn putrid and soft / On your forehead / While you dance?"
— Amy Lowell, 'Grotesque'
"At midnight, especially on Walpurgisnacht, the Devil holds picnics in the graveyards and invites the witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, and eat them. Anyone will tell you that."
— Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; from ‘The Werewolf’
"Here’s honest rot / To unpick the heart, pare bone / Free of the fictive vein."
— Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems; from ‘November Graveyard’
"…but from that day on the smell of death became stronger, till it filled the room, tainting the water in her jug, bleeding into the sheets. I brought fresh flowers every morning: all the petals had fallen by the middle of the afternoon."
— John Burnside, from 'The Dumb House'
"There's a drop of blood in my soup / it's the blood of You."
— Alice Notley, Disobedience; 'You'
"And this skull was strung up by a system of unseen cords, so that it appeared to hang, disembodied, in the still, heavy air, and it had been crowned with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride."
— Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories; ‘The Bloody Chamber’
"His promises were the surgeon’s gag / Her promises took the top off his skull / She would get a brooch made of it / His vows pulled out all her sinews / He showed her how to make a love-knot / Her vows put his eyes in formalin / At the back of her secret drawer / Their screams stuck in the wall / Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves / Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop / In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs / In their dreams their brains took each other hostage / In the morning they wore each other’s face"
— Ted Hughes, Crow; from ‘Lovesong’
"A vision came to her of an ancient goddess lying stretched out in the underworld, prey of death. Her flesh was putrid and swarming with maggots, her decaying form covered with all manner of festering sores that smoldered and gave off black sparks. The luridness of the sight sent the goddess’s lover fleeing in horror, and the moment that he turned and ran, she arose and swept after him in fury, all the love she had borne him transformed utterly into blinding hatred."
— Fumiko Enchi from 'Masks', tr. Juliet Winters Carpenter
"In the gloom of the old asylum human ruins decay. / The dead orphans lie by the garden wall. / From grey rooms step angels with shit-spattered wings. / Worms drip from their yellowed lids."
— Georg Trakl, Surrender to Night: Collected Poems of Georg Trakl: Poems; from 'Psalm', tr. Will Stone
"What do they do with kidneys and toes / in hospitals? And where did your old dog go / who peed on the rug and growled? / They are at my house now, and what grinds / in your wife’s teeth while she sleeps / is mine. She is chewing / on embryos, on the eyes of your lover, / on your phone book and the empty glass / you left in the kitchen. And in your body, / the one who died there and rots / secretly in the fingers of your spirit, / she is hauling his genitals out, basket / after basket / and mangling all of it in the crusher."
— C. K. Williams, Lies; from 'Trash'
"Her head lolled to one side. Her skin was pale and ravaged with rot, her mouth open, her blank eyes upturned toward the sky. A centipede, glistening and black in the rain, slipped across her cheek and wormed its way into her nostril."
— Dale Bailey, from 'In the Night Wood'
"Hand in hand they skulked, stumbled, ran from door to door, from trashcan to trashcan, from waste heap to waste heap, later returning to their mother’s corpse, to slap their thighs with laughter, to yowl out dirges, to cry, to dance in a strangely disjointed manner, pausing once in a while to kneel down by the corpse, then staring off into space. [...] The children could see clearly how the corpse had begun bleeding from its eyes, nose, and ears. They pointed at it with their spindly fingers, giggled, and chanted their song more ghoulishly and boisterously than ever. [...] The children were nailed inside the apartment with the corpse in question. As their tomb was quite generously proportioned, with numerous burial chambers, it didn’t occur to the children at first that they’d been buried alive. With time, though, the madness of hunger began to ravage the children’s brains; they began to circle the corpse; the madness of hunger tore their jaws open wide. For long days their hunger encouraged them, before they finally wedged their spindly fingers into their mother’s rotting flesh and gnawed down to her bones."
— Marianne Fritz, from 'The Weight of Things', tr. Adrian Nathan West
"The figure was tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave. The mask which concealed the visage was made so nearly to resemble the countenance of a stiffened corpse that the closest scrutiny must have had difficulty in detecting the cheat. And yet all this might have been endured, if not approved, by the mad revellers around. But the mummer had gone so far as to assume the type of the Red Death. His vesture was dabbled in blood— and his broad brow, with all the features of the face, was besprinkled with the scarlet horror."
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Penguin Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe; from ‘The Masque of the Red Death’
yousharknotpass
tangentwithtanner
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
theartofmadeline
dailybridgerton
