The Grotesque Quotes

“Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque

“Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque

“There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque.”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque

“Quanto al destino, sono giunto alla conclusione che il mio sia quello d'essere grottesco. Sì, perché non è forse grottesco un uomo tramutato in vegetale?”
― Patrick McGrath, Grottesco

“She carried a faint odor of cocktail sausages mingled with sweat. Like a fool I slipped my hand up the inside of her leg. I felt the roughness of her nylons.”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque

“Her mouth was smeared with lipstick and her throat swung bagged and cross-hatched from a wrinkled knob of chin flanked by rouged jowls loosely depending from lumpy cheekbones. Powerful gusts of stale scent emanated from the crannies of her person; the little dog was curled in her lap like a hairy tumor.”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque

“Hugo," she said, in a certain hurt tone that I knew well and enjoyed provoking, "you can be most horribly rude when you choose. Why do you choose?”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque

“Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace.”
― Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque