“A monster is a thing deformed against kind, both of man or of beast or of anything else.”
Lisa Verner, The Epistemology of the Monstrous in the Middle Ages
“By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed.”
Jeffrey Cohen, Monster Theory
“The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life.”
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror
“A young girl would go into the woods as trustingly as Red Riding Hood to her granny’s house but this light admits of no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems.”
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber
“Sometimes intimacy is the only way real magic works.”
Indra Das, The Devourers
“I am not a creation of the antique pastoral world—I am modernity personified.”
John Logan, Penny Dreadful
“I had dismissed her coupling with the bull as some perverse whim, but she was not ruled by appetites; she ruled with them instead.”
Madeline Miller, Circe
“Rage/ Throws me back at last/ into this mundane reality/ in this transfigured flesh/ that aligns me with the power of my Being/ In birthing my rage,/ my rage rebirthed me.”
Susan Stryker, “My words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”
“With the advent of electrical lights pushing away the darkness and global exploration exposing much of the worlds fears to be just myth, it’s becoming more and more difficult to blame our flaws on monsters. The beast, it turns out, has been inside us the whole time.”
Aaron Mahnke, Lore Episode 3: The Beast Within
