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Clive Barker

The Hellbound Heart

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  • Maria Vhas quoted10 years ago
    Somehow the theft of Rory’s name was as unforgivable as stealing his skin; or so her grief told her. A skin was nothing. Pigs had skins; snakes had skins. They were knitted of dead cells, shed and grown and shed again. But a name? That was a spell, which summoned memories. She would not let Frank usurp it.
  • Maria Vhas quoted10 years ago
    “I need you,” he said, raising his mouth to her ear. Once, half a lifetime ago, her heart had seemed to skip at such a profession. Now she knew better. Her heart was no acrobat; there was no tingle in the coils of her abdomen. Only the steady workings of her body. Breath drawn, blood circulated, food pulped and purged. Thinking of her anatomy thus, untainted by romanticism-as a collection of natural imperatives housed in muscle and bone-she found it easier to let him strip her blouse and put his face to her breasts. Her nerve endings dutifully responded to his tongue, but again, it was merely an anatomy lesson. She stood back in the dome of her skull, and was unmoved.
  • Maria Vhas quoted10 years ago
    Mother knows best,
  • Maria Vhas quoted10 years ago
    I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost
    Who died before the god of Love was born.
    -John Donne, Love’s Deitie
  • b6915433259has quoted5 years ago
    the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated.
  • антонhas quoted5 years ago
    "This isn't happening," she told herself aloud, but the beast only laughed.

    "I used to tell myself that," he said. "Day in, day out. Used to try and dream the agonies away. But you can't. Take it from me. You can't. They have to be endured."
  • антонhas quoted5 years ago
    Nothing, was the answer of course. She was helpless, as only she had ever been in dreams, those dreams of pursuit and assault that her psyche had always staged on a ghetto street in some eternal night. Never-not even in her most witless fantasies-had she anticipated that the arena would be a room she had walked past a dozen times, in a house where she had been happy, while outside the day went on as ever, gray on gray.
  • антонhas quoted5 years ago
    They had overdosed him on sensuality, until his mind teetered on madness, then they'd initiated him into experiences that his nerves still convulsed to recall. They had called it pleasure, and perhaps they'd meant it. Perhaps not. It was impossible to know with these minds; they were so hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous. They recognized no principles of reward and punishment by which he could hope to win some respite from their tortures, nor were they touched by any appeal for mercy. He'd tried that, over the weeks and months that separated the solving of the box from today.
  • антонhas quoted5 years ago
    downward spiral began. He spent three months in a wash of depression and self-pity that bordered on the suicidal. But even that solution was denied him by his newfound nihilism. If nothing was worth living for it followed, didn't it, that there was nothing worth dying for either. He stumbled from one such sterility to the next, until all thoughts were rotted away by whatever opiate his immoralities could earn him.
  • антонhas quoted5 years ago
    Everywhere, in the wreckage around him, he found evidence to support the same bitter thesis: that he had encountered nothing in his life-no person, no state of mind or body-he wanted sufficiently to suffer even passing discomfort for.
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