By Category: Violence

“The other day I wrote down the following wish: 'When passing a house, to be pulled in through the ground-floor window by a rope tied around one's neck and to be hauled up, bloody and ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics, without consideration, as if by a person who is paying no attention, until the empty noose, dropping the last shreds of me when breaking through the roof tiles, appears on the roof.”

-letter, Franz Kafka

~

“'But people will have been killed!'

'Oh yes... I daresay that's quite likely. It's really quite difficult to be a murderer without killing people from time to time, you know.'”

-Phantom, Susan Kay

~

“O-REN: I'm going to say this in English so you know how serious I am. As your leader, I encourage you to -- from time to time and always in a respectful manner, and with the complete knowledge that my decision is final -- to question my logic. If you're unconvinced a particular plan of action I've decided is the wisest, tell me so. But allow me to convince you. And I will promise you, right here and now, no subject will be taboo...except the subject that was just under discussion.
The price you pay for bringing up either my Chinese or my American heritage as a negative is, I collect your fuckin head. Just like this fucker here. Now if any of you sonsabitches got anything else to say, now's the fuckin time.

I didn't think so. Meeting adjourned.”

-Kill Bill Vol. 1 [movie]

~

“THE BRIDE: I'm allowing you to keep your wicked life for one reason and one reason only. So you can tell him, in person, everything that happened here tonight. I want him to witness the extent of my mercy..., by witnessing your deformed body. I want you to tell him, all the information you just told me. I want him to know what I know. I want him to know I want him to know. And I want them all to know, they'll all soon be as dead as O-REN.”

-Kill Bill Vol. 1 [movie]

~

“THE BRIDE: It was not my intention to do this in front of you. For that I'm sorry. But you can take my word for it, your mother had it coming. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I'll be waiting.”

-Kill Bill Vol. 1 [movie]

~

“But anyway, this is what it feels like to get violated. What you're feeling now. It's awful, isn't it? I mean, it makes you feel so powerless.”

-She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb

~

“I stood looking down out of the window. The street seemed miles down. Suddenly I felt as if I'd flung myself out of the window. I could see myself lying on the pavement. Then I seemed to be standing by the body on the pavement. I was two people. Blood and brains were scattered everywhere. I knelt down and began licking up the blood and brains.”

-The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

~

“I have said that my grandfather was and had always been a mysteriarch, never a philanthropist of the mind, not a restorer of wounded psyches. In no way did he take a therapeutic approach with the inmates at the sanitarium. He did not view them as souls that were possessed, either by demons or by their own painful histories, but as beings who held a strange alliance with other orders of existence, who contained within themselves a particle of something eternal, a golden speck of magic which he thought might be enlarged. Thus, his ambition led him not to relieve his patients' madness, but to exasperate it -- to let it breathe with a life of its own. And this he did in certain ways that wholly eradicated what human qualities remained in these people. But sometimes that peculiar magic he saw in their eyes would seem to fade, and then he would institute his 'proper treatment,' which consisted of putting them through a battery of hellish ordeals intended to loosen their attachment to the world of humanity and to project them further into the absolute, the realm of the 'silent, staring universe' where the ultimate insanity of the infinite void might work a rather paradoxical cure. The result was something as pathetic as a puppet and as magnificent as the stars, something at once dead and never dying, a thing utterly without destiny and thus imperishable, possessing that abysmal absence of mind, that infinite vacuity which is the essence of all that is immortal.”

-Dr. Locrian's Asylum, Thomas Ligotti

~

“Believe me, if I started killing people... there'd be none of you left.”

-Charles Manson

Recommended by Tori.

~

“One day, when Eve was in the eighth grade, she had pretended to have cramps and had been allowed to sit out on the sidelines. She was sitting on a bench, absorbed in reading Plato's Republic for the third time. Her mother called to her and asked her to hold the long rope hanging from the ceiling while she showed some girls in the class how to shinny up it. Her mother never gave up trying to drag Eve into the physical world. Every day after school, when Clare and her mother went to field hockey practice, Eve would rush back to the seminary just in time to attend her father's class on Systematic Theology. Eve prided herself on being totally out of shape and joked about not wanting any more muscles in her body than were absolutey necessary to enable her to turn a page in The Republic.

When Eve pretended not to hear her mother's request to hold the rope for her, her mother asked another girl in the gym class to do it. Eve peered over her book for a second to watch her mother climbing up the rope toward the ceiling. Despite being slightly overweight, her mother was very strong and agile. As she got almost to the top, the girl holding the rope at the bottom was suddenly knocked off her feet by a basketball careening through the air from the other end of the gym. The rope was jerked out of the girl's hand and spun out into the air. Up near the ceiling, Eve's mother lost her balance and began to fall. She grasped for the rope as she fell, but she and the rope were spinning away from each other in opposite directions and she couldn't regain her grip.

The Republic dropped out of Eve's hands with a thud when her mother hit the ground. All the girls began screaming and looking over at Eve. But Eve was paralyzed. She couldn't get up to go over to her mother, who lay perfectly still on the floor of the gym.

When the ambulance arrived, her mother was already dead. She had died the moment she hit the floor. There was no blood, and no external sign of injury. As they carried her mother out on the stretcher, Eve noticed she looked like she was sleeping. Eve reached down and picked up The Republic. The school nurse came over and led Eve out of the gym. Eve kept one finger in The Republic so as not to lose her place.”

-Eve's Longing: The Infinite Possibilities in All Things, Deborah McKay

~

“If I longed for destruction it was merely that this eye might be extinguished. I longed for an earthquake, for some cataclysm of nature which would plunge the lighthouse into the sea. I wanted a metamorphosis, a change to fish, to leviathan, to destroyer. I wanted the earth to open up, to swallow everything in one engulfing yawn. I wanted to see the city buried fathoms deep in the bosom of the sea. I wanted to sit in a cave and read by candlelight. I wanted that eye extinguished so that I might have a chance to know my own body, my own desires. I wanted to be alone for a thousand years in order to reflect on what I had seen and heard--and in order to forget.”

-The Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller

~

“And now when I see her searching the garbage - for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn't matter. It's too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it's much, much, much too late.”

-The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

~

“I have wished you dead and myself dead.
How could it be otherwise.
I have broken into you like a burglar.
And you've set your dogs on me.
And a pile of broken sticks.
A child could kick.
I have climbed you like a monument, gasping,
For the exercise and the view,
And leaned over the railing at the top...
Strong and warm, the summer wind.”

-I Have Wished You Dead, Alicia Ostriker

~

“A curious thing about atrocity stories is that they mirror, instead of the events they purport to describe, the extent of the hatred of the people that tell them.

Still, you can't listen unmoved to tales of misery and murder.”

-Introduction to Civil War 1916-1937, John Dos Passos

~

“The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide -- as, I think, he will. Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips, and guns -- or dollars. Take your choice -- there is no other -- and your time is running out.”

-Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

~

“Twenty-seven men with faces blackened and shiny - with hatchets in their belts, bombs in pockets, knobkerries - waiting in a dug-out in the reserve line. At 10.30 they trudge up to Battalion H.Q. splashing through the mire and water in a chalk trench, while the rain comes steadily down. Then up to the front-line. In a few minutes they have gone over and disappeared into the rain and darkness.

I am sitting on the parapet listening for something to happen - five, ten, nearly fifteen minutes - not a sound - nor a shot fired - and only the usual flare-lights. Then one of the men comes crawling back; I follow him to our trench and he tells me that they can't get through. They are all going to throw a bomb and retire.

A minute or two later a rifle-shot rings out and almost simultaneously several bombs are thrown by both sides; there are blinding flashes and explosions, rifle-shots, the scurry of feet, curses and groans, and stumbling figures loom up and scramble over the parapet - some wounded. When I've counted sixteen in, I go forward to see how things are going. Other wounded men crawl in; I find one hit in the leg; he says O'Brien is somewhere down the crater badly wounded. They are still throwing bombs and firing at us: the sinister sound of clicking bolts seem to be very near; perhaps they have crawled out of their trench and are firing from behind the advanced wire.

At last I find O'Brien down a deep (about twenty-five feet) and precipitous crater. He is moaning and his right arm is either broken or almost shot off: he is also hit in the right leg. Another man is with him; he is hit in the right arm. I leave them there and get back to the trench for help, shortly afterwards Lance-Corporal Stubbs is brought in (he has had his foot blown off). I get a rope and two more men and go back to O'Brien, who is unconscious now. With great difficulty we get him half-way up the face of the crater; it is now after one o'clock and the sky is beginning to get lighter. I make one more journey to our trench for another strong man and to see to a stretcher being ready. We get him in, and it is found that he has died, as I had feared.”

-describing in his diary details of a patrol into No Man's Land that took place on May 25, 1916, Siegfried Sasson

~

“I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you'll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.”

-Suicide In The Trenches, Siegfried Sasson

~

“Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.”

-Schindler's List [movie]

~

“Daddy?
That's another kind of prison.
It's not the prince at all,
but my father
drunkenly bent over my bed,
circling the abyss like a shark....”

-Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty), Anne Sexton

~

“I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.”

-Her Kind, Anne Sexton

~

“I do wish we could chat longer but I'm having an old friend for dinner.”

-The Silence Of The Lambs [movie]

~

“You're everybody's second home
Always trying to get me alone
An easy way to lose it all
Always there when all else fails
Over by the west side rails

But I don't really need that now
I never really did anyhow
I only really needed alcohol
Something that'll treat me okay
And wouldn't say the things you'd say

Please turn out the light
I get a sick confusion headache trying to figure out who's right

Dreaming on the silver strand
Waking up to plainclothes man
You little bastard, little boy in blue
Someone's gonna get to you
And fuck up everything you do

He's so unhappy inside
He's serious with everyone
And he thinks he'll win you with his angry kiss
Acting like he has no needs
Wanting you to watch him bleed

Made for each other bet you pay me any mind
Just goes to show my continual decline
They say that I'll recover my love of her once in a while
But I don't know
I don't think so...

There's something that I'll tell you now
Now that no one else is around
The sort of lesson that I learned from you
Not quite the way you planned
But I know you'll understand

Someone takes a photograph
A picture while their sweetheart laughs
A perfect moment in a flash of light
Counting back from 3 to 1
That's exactly what you've done

And I'm so unsurprised
I remember, I remember why I dream in black & white

Goes to show my continual decline
They say that I'll recover my love of her once in a while
But I don't know
I don't think so
I don't think so... ”

-Plainclothes Man, Elliott Smith

~

“i ran down the stairs and into the garden
put both my hands into the soil
in the spring
you will bloom
like her heart through the blouse in the back of the ambulance.”

-Steps Ascending, Thursday

~

“You say when he hits you, you don't mind
Because when he hurts you, you feel alive.
Oh, is that what it is?”

-Stay (Faraway, So Close!), U2

~

“When you're abused like that, you know you've touched the stars.”

-Velvet Goldmine [movie]

Recommended by beck.

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