Kayla > Kayla's Quotes

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka

“The meaning of life is that it stops.”
― Franz Kafka

“There is an infinite amount of hope in the universe ... but not for us.”
― Franz Kafka

“I mean," Rupert looked up at me cogiatively, "almost everyone is a homosexual, aren't they? Boys, I mean."
"I sometimes think so," I hedged.
"Is Grandpa one?"
"Good heavens, no," I protested.
"Am I one?"Rupert asked intently.
"It's a bit early to say yet, old fellow. But you could be, you know."
"Goody!" he squealed, banging his heels against the front of the sofa again. "Then I can come and live with you.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“... We were just having a talk about homosexuality."
"He is frightfully interested in that at the moment, although he can't have the least idea what it is - can he? It must be the effect of his overbearing and possessive mum. Odd what little children get up to; I was a committed transvestite at his age. But that seemed to get it out of the system," he added hastily.”
― Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library

“One day he and Sutcliffe were walking down Madison Avenue when a man they knew came up and told them a mutual friend had just died in San Francisco. “Of it?” they gasped. “No,” the man said, “he was run over by a taxicab.” “Oh, thank God!” They both said in unison. That was where AIDS stood in the hierarchy of misfortune, somehow; in a class by itself—so grim its aura extended to the fact, he thinks as he enters the nursing home, that people who don’t have AIDS imagine somehow they’re not going to die.”
― Andrew Holleran, The Beauty of Men

“You may be paralyzed from the neck down, you may have itchy skin and only one good eye, you may wake up every day still paralyzed, still in this nursing home, you may not be able to feed, bathe, or brush your teeth or wipe your butt or walk or dance or drive a car or take a shower or do one thing you want to do, including scratching your nose but you can't die, because everyone else has and you're all I've got.”
― Andrew Holleran

“Dreams decompose, darling, <...> like anything else. And they give off gases, some of which are poisonous and all of which are unpleasant, and so one goes away from the place in which the dreams were dreamed, and are now decomposing before your very eyes. Otherwise, you might die, dear, of monoxide poisoning.”
― Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

“You started it," I point out. "Will you at least think of me?"
She grins and shakes her head. "Sorry, I'm actually planning to picture—" She names a popular movie star. I bite the inside of my cheek. I doubt she'd fantasize about him if she knew he likes to skull-fuck dead pre-teen boys.
Judy must detect something in my face because she asks, "What's wrong? Have you met him?"
I think about the way the movie star always insists upon cutting out the pre-teen boys' tongues so he can take them home with him, and I say, "Um, no, I don't think so. No. I haven't met him.”
― Chandler Morrison, Along the Path of Torment

“Never relinquish your terrors. That's when they catch you.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse

“Stay with me.’ His eyes shone. ‘Play with me.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse

“I’d say to myself, Andrew Compton, you’ve sucked their cold mouths and cocks; you’ve licked their blood from your hands by the bucketful; you’ve boiled the flesh off their skulls, then used the same pot to make curry. Why not just fry up a few tender bits and see what it’s like—perhaps with a nice egg?”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse

“What are you doing?"

"Killing you." A ghost of a smile touched his ips, but not his pale eyes.

"Why?"

"Because it's what we do. And because you're beautiful.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse

“I'm Lush Rimbaud, and I refuse to shut up or die.”
― Poppy Z. Brite, Exquisite Corpse