Books Of Blood, Volume Three Quotes
"Life was too long if you were locked away and counting it in seconds."
"Better to string yourself up by your belt in the middle of the night rather than face the tedium of another twenty-four hours."
"First he bought a gun on the prison black market. It cost him everything he had and a handful of IOUs he'd have to make good on the outside if he wanted to stay alive."
"Sing-Sing was smiling at him, all greasy chops."
"The satisfaction was that of pulling up a drawbridge and leaving the enemy on the other side of the moat."
"The word cancer wasn't in Barberio's vocabulary."
"He didn't know, and it was probably better that he didn't, that he'd torn open his wound getting into this place, and he was bleeding to death."
"Half a century of movie-goers had lived vicariously through the screen of the Movie Palace, pressing their sympathies and their passions on to the flickering illusion."
"If he'd searched the city from top to bottom Barberio couldn't have found a more secret place to perish."
"It's quite a thing, he thought, this mind of mine. To have created an alternative world so eerily well. It was a wonderful trick."
"Wouldn't it have been better to be wrong, and just a little spaced-out tonight, than right, and in the hands of a power that could literally change the world?"
"Nobody dies in the movies, Ricky. You know that as well as I do. You can always thread the celluloid up again."
"The illusion of life created from a perfect sequence of little deaths."
"Fictions are fuckable if you don't want marriage."
"I am a function of you; made for you out of you. The perfect fantasy."
"Everything stopped: her heart too, it seemed."
"He lived in the eternal present of his hunger and his strength."
"What Milton could get done for you, couldn't be done quicker. He was the best: and he hated sloth in other people as much as in himself."
"This was to be his castle: his retreat from a world that made him dyspeptic and rich."
"It's all part of village life, Ronnie. If we're going to live here, we have to become part of the community."
"Clever, he thought, to give him a get-out that's more unattractive than staying put."
"He opened the door and stepped into the yard. He was in his shirt-sleeves and the wind was bitingly cold, but the rain had stopped."
"For the first time in forty-five years I've had a real glimpse of something, a vision maybe, and I'm scared of being laughed at."
"They called it Rawhead because its head was huge, and the colour of the moon, and raw, like meat."
"Rawhead swallowed his fear and prepared for the confrontation. The moon grew teeth."
"In the chaos of his study Coot was unsuccessfully fighting off sleep."
"If we leave once the place is threatened, we give up on it altogether."
"I want to see him caught: whoever he is. I want to know it's all been cleared up, see it with my own eyes."
"With every mile they drove out of Zeal Ron's fears diminished. Soon, he was singing."
"Ronnie found the pain curiously reassuring; it seemed to heal his guilty psyche better than a string of Hail Marys."
"Then, having finished with his gesture of remorse, he sat down, like any decent man who has been deeply wronged, and planned murder."
"There was still a will to revenge in him. A part of his mind, unforgiving of trespasses, was prepared to postpone Paradise in order to finish the job he had started."
"Oh for a voice; for a fist, for a body to use for a time. Then he'd show this meat-merchant how bodies should be treated."
"The banality of it, thought Ronnie, the life-decaying banality of it."
"This mindless conversation, after those hours of torture, of sudden death, of the post-mortem that he'd so recently endured, was almost beyond endurance."
"The will was not enough though: it needed a focus, and a means of escape."
"Occupying this strange, bloodless physique he had a new freedom from the constraints of humanity."
"He was alive suddenly to the life of the air, feeling it now fill and billow him."
"Commit his favourite landscapes to canvas; maybe a view of the garden, even a nude of Raquel, immortalised in oils before her tits sagged beyond all hope of support."
"You can't avoid a place that doesn't exist, can you?"
"It gave me no small satisfaction to hear Jonathan slanged; I even hoped Ray would lose his cool enough to bloody that perfect hook nose."
"There was no wind: the cold was coming up out of the sea. It's still night down there, I thought, just a few yards off the beach; limitless night."
"I'd always thought his Jewish good looks too bland to be beautiful."
"Love, he said. Easy word; he meant nothing by it."
"My bare breasts were already brown as two nuts, and, I thought, about as big. Still, you can't have everything."
"Total silence wrapped us up, a damp and smothering hush."
"Food for crabs, if any self-respecting crab condescended to live here."
"I thought, for no reason, of the slops on the sea, bobbing around, waiting for the next wave to catch them."
"The sun wasn't hot enough to warm me that deep, where I should be hottest."
"We had something in common, the sheep and I."
"The water was icy; far colder than I'd anticipated, and it took the breath away."
"Relentlessly the tide bears us - sometimes floating, bloated decks for gulls, sometimes half-sunk and nibbled by fish - bears us towards the island."
"Indifference was a trade-mark of his, even a part of his attraction."
"Strict watch was kept for the smallest sign of venereal disease - the only type of lovesickness he ever suffered."
"It seldom happened. Uninvited crabs aside there was little to do in that half-hour of self-appraisal but admire the collision of genes that had made him."
"He was wonderful. People told him that all the time. Wonderful."
"He prided himself that there was seldom more than a few minutes between tricks, and never as much as an hour."
"Still, this year. Oh yes, this year for certain, it had to be this year. Something good was coming with the autumn, he knew it for sure."
"No Indian summer to bless the streets this year: autumn had London in its jaws and was shaking the city bare."
"You're living in the real world, his head said (it was a revelation), and if you're not very careful you're going to die there."
"Where was he to go now? The flat would feel like a prison tonight, even if he smoked a little dope to take the edge off the room."
"It was like paranoia, except that he wasn't paranoid. If he was paranoid, he reasoned, somebody would tell him."
"The vision reached across and touched Gavin's jaw, lightly, running its crudely carved fingers along the lips of the wound Preetorius had made. 'We're going to have a scar,' it said."
"'Because I am yourself,' it said, in reply to the unspoken question, 'made perfectible.'"
"'There was nothing to be done. His life was theirs now to sneer at and salivate over: even have a nervous moment, one or two of them, when they saw his photographs and wondered if perhaps they'd paid for this boy themselves, some horny night.'"
"'Let them have it all. They were welcome. From now on he would be lawless, because laws protect possessions and he had none.'"
"'I am a thing without a proper name,' it pronounced. 'I am a wound in the flank of the world. But I am also that perfect stranger you always prayed for as a child, to come and take you, call you beauty, lift you naked out of the street and through Heaven's window. Aren't I? Aren't I?'"
"'I'll come and see you again,' said the painted face. 'Meanwhile - if I were you - ' it laughed,' - I'd be going.'"
"'Wouldn't you?' said the other. 'I think you would.'"
"'You want an explanation?' Reynolds replied, 'you can have whatever you can find.'"
"'It's a sickness,' Reynolds replied. 'Needing to live in the past.'"
"'When it's perfected its physical imitation, I think it'll steal the one thing it can't imitate: your soul.'"
"'There was rare purpose in his step as he crossed Kensington. After years of being the victim of circumstance he saw circumstance embodied at last. He would shake sense from it, or die trying.'"
"'He began to see the creature not as a monster terrorising him, but as his tool, his public persona almost. It was substance: he shadow.'"
"'Why is it all so painful?' it asked, after a pause. 'Why is it loss that makes me human?'"