The Ritual Quotes

“Some teeth long for ripping, gleaming wet from black dog gums. So you keep your eyes closed at the end. You don't want to see such a mouth up close. before the bite, before its oblivion in the goring of your soft parts, the speckled lips will curl back in a whinny of excitement. You just know it.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“Everyone is fucked up, Luke. Damaged. We’re all messed up, underneath. Doesn’t matter what kind of house you live in.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“There was simply no preparation in life for the determined madness of others.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“It’s like you said, it’s all about P.R. these days. Brand management. Social networking. The corporatization of our own experience. We’re all our very own communications directors. But what a load of bollocks it all is when you’re faced by something like this.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“From the very core of each of them, their ancestors seemed to cry out in inarticulate voices. right then, they screamed in alarm from times before symbols and language could depict such things that hunted and meant murder.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“How little do we know of anyone, let alone ourselves?”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“Old magic may have kept it living, but new steel ended its long and miserable existence;”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“His throat was thick with an emotion that could've been loneliness, or sadness, or self-pity, or despair, or all of these things at once. He didn't know, but he thought anything, even death, was better than feeling this way.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“They deserved to die. He wanted them dead. He wanted their young but poisonous blood shed, and this wretched part of the world erased from the earth. Blood and soil. Yes, they were right. Ragnarok was coming down fast, but not in the way they anticipated. He'd give them their blood and soil.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“Through their discomforts Dom and Phil were missing everything of interest: the sudden strip marshes, the faces in the rock formations, the perfect lakes, the awesome måskoskårså valley grooved into the earth during the Ice Age, the golden eagle circling above it, and the views of a landscape it was impossible to believe existed in Europe.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“His friends had been destroyed for no reason he could think of. They had been destroyed like most people were destroyed. By just being in the wrong place. After all of that development and growing and cultivating and caution and survivable self-destruction and failure and regeneration and struggling and coping, they had just walked through the wrong bunch of bloody trees. And that was that.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“I am of the generation of arse, he mouthed and then laughed silently. We couldn’t find water in a reservoir. When we walk in a forest we all die. We are but baby birds fallen from nests to an unforgiving earth.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“Fear and big white eyes inside a suit of dirty skin: that’s all he was now.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“You sure? No one will know we’re down there.’ ‘Makes no difference. The Environment office was closed when we left, and I never called ahead to the Porjus branch. It’ll be fine though.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“She never moved again. He’d shot out her tiny heart.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“If only we could all stand up. All of us who have died unjustly for the Gods of the insane. There would be so many of us.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“few natural disasters, or the wrong people take charge, or a war gets out of hand and changes the colour of the sky, or the earth becomes irreparably poisoned and water and food run short … and skulls would be smashed, again.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“On the lonely and dreary place where they were supposed to have met their end, remained the final clues of what befell their hiking trip. Evidence of four friends who took a short cut.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“he had nothing else to believe in but unexamined statements.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“A flock of birds heaved themselves into the sky, accelerated, swooped to the south; frantic to put distance between themselves and the sound of what now moved over the face of the earth. It was right below their position on the hill, moving through the trees on the south side, its footfalls silent.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“Everyone’s judgement was impaired. Nothing said or done now could be trusted. But somehow it wouldn’t be forgotten or forgiven.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“Hutch had never seen, read, or heard of anything like it; not in twenty years engaged in outdoor pursuits. It had confounded Luke too; he could tell his friend was still struggling with the mystery in silence. And also thinking exactly what he was thinking: what the hell could do that to a large animal?”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“She was yoghurty, sour-creamy, sebaceous. He was smelling her cunt through a nose he knew to be smashed flat.”
― Adam L.G. Nevill, The Ritual

“Maybe for short periods of time it seemed to him, inside that stinking bed, that some people were exempt from tragedy and pain, but those respites were short; in the scheme of things and in the length of eternity, respites were nothing but anomalies in a relentless flow of despair and pain and sadness and horror that surely would eventually sweep everyone away”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“He stared at Phil. ‘But it bothers you. It pisses you off that I’m not crippled with debt or saddled with some moody bitch. Instead, you P.R. your lives and act like I’m supposed to envy you. Who would want it, boys? Look how bloody old you look. Both of you. Fucking fat and grey and you’re not even forty yet. Is this what a family does? And marriage? Am I supposed to aspire to it? Envy it? And if I don’t, I should be excluded? Why? I’ll tell you why, because I remind you of everything you can’t do. Yes, can’t do. Because you are not allowed to.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“and Dom’s painful swollen knee, and the way it too was exasperated”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“the forest canopy left an incremental impression of going deeper inside something that narrowed around them; while looking for the light and space of an open sky they were actually descending into an environment that was only getting darker and more disorientating, step by step.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“something that narrowed around them; while looking for the light and space of an open sky they were actually descending into an environment that was only getting darker and more disorientating, step by step.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“Someone is crying. Upstairs. He looks to the indistinct ceiling and swallows the fear that is tightening his throat.”
― Adam Nevill, The Ritual

“– Как ты и сказал, в эти дни главное – пиар. Управление брендом. Социальные сети. Акционирование собственного опыта. Мы все рекламируем себя, как можем. Но какой это оказывается чушью, когда сталкиваешься с чем-то подобным.”
― Адам Нэвилл, The Ritual