I’m fine, Mom. Thanks for asking.”...“Of course you’re fine.” She keeps walking. “You’re the devil’s bride and these are his creatures.”...“I’m not the devil’s bride.” “He carried you out of the fire and is letting you visit us from the dead. Who else would have those privileges except his bride?

There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism.

...and there you have it, another body on the floor surrounded by things that don't mean much to anyone except to the one who can't take any of them along.

Twas something else. I had come to hate her, you see. I had come to wish her dead, and that was what held me back.

Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack, all dressed in black, black, black. She has a knife, knife, knife, stuck in her back, back, back. She cannot breathe, breathe, breathe. She cannot cry, cry, cry. Thats why she begs, begs, begs. She begs to die, die ,die..

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.

Tanith frowned. Did people still go on DATES any more? She was sure they did. They probably called it something different though. She tried to think of the last date she'd been on. The last PROPER date. Did fighting side by side with Saracen Rue count as a date? They ended up snuggling under the moonlight, drenched in gore and pieces of brain - so it had PROBABLY been a date. If it wasn't, it was certainly a fun time had by all. Well, not ALL. But she and Saracen had sure had a blast.

It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.

Well, you’re not exactly social, are you, Mandy Valems?”“Oh yeah, sure, because I’m just surrounded by genius to be social with in this day and age,” Mandy replied with razor-sharp sarcasm. “Hey, I don’t need anyone else! I’ve got you, you’re my friend, and you’ll be with me forever!”“…You won’t be with me forever, though…” said Alecto cynically. “I’m like a spider’s web; anyone who is friends with me gets dragged into my troubles and eventually dies.”“…Poetic, dear friend,” Mandy sighed, shaking her head. “Morbid, but poetic.

Nobody really wants to be your friend when they discover that you work with dead people.

Beware of those who are bored and not passionate about life, for they will bore you with reasons for not living.

Of course, if one does not fully trust the promise of God's Kingdom, he will have a hard time taking risks and making sacrifices in this life. A gospel centered around the temporal self - fleeting happiness, earthly success, vain prosperity, things such as these - is the primary ambition of the half-hearted Christian; the one who somewhat believes he is subject to an eternal death; the one who just might believe in men before God, who morbidly fears seeming less than anyone else. The man of this school feels deeply that he has but one life to live, that this must be his only chance, and therefore must have it all in his favor - from glory to comfort to riches - and have it right this instant. He is but hinting that he is overcome because he insists always that he must overcome, that his judgment comes now and by the persons around him. The point is, however, in this sense, that by grace the Christian is indeed free, but only for as long as he wants to be free - the practicality of true freedom: that of God which offers not so much freedom to be like the world as it does freedom from the pressures of having to be like the world. For Divine Law is based solely on love and freedom; whereas secular law, pressure and imitation.

To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.

Envy and respect are not the same things...Before I endow you with respect, I should find out whether your curiosity is intellectual or merely morbid. Not that those who gawk at train derailments are so different from those who conduct autopsies; both want, at some level, to know what has happened, and, by extension, what will happen. Did the liver fail because of the decedent's alcoholism or was some toxin administered? If the deliverer is found, he or she may be imprisoned or, in more honest times, hanged, and thus pose no further threat. Or for the gawker at the accident, espying loose parts not unlike his or her own parts strewn amid wreckage may lead to a sense of awe at death's power, or horror at life's fragility, either of which may be instructive in any number of ways.

Relationships must be fostered as far as possible and maintained, and thus a morbid transference can be avoided.

Directing a funeral isn’t about death at all. Funerals are for the living, not the dead.

Why’d you want to kill yourself? Didn’t you feel anything, or didn’t it hurt you?” Mandy questioned, looking puzzled. “Yes, I suppose it did, … it was strange, it was sharp, that’s all I can think of to describe it… and cold, but not cold like ice, more like… I don’t know, like something much worse, something horrible… and it seemed like the ground was falling upwards, becoming the sky… for a moment it made me consider that it was just a dream, that I was on some sort of drug, and then I remember being overjoyed to see the sky was still above me, then just really sad, really tired… and then I don’t remember much else about it,” Alecto told her, glaring straight ahead at the sky with narrowed eyes. “I don’t mind, I’m not supposed to mind, anyway. Mearth already told me that eventually I would want to be dead, that it was inevitable… still, I sometimes wish that I could have done something good for other people in my life, it might have made up for all the bad stuff I’ve done.

What is living? Forging memories. What is dying? Forgetting them.I never die.

If on thoughts of death we are fed,Thus, a coffin, became my bed.

And in a mad tranceStrike with our spirit's knifeInvulnerable nothingsWe decayLike corpses in a charnelFear & GriefConvulse is & consume usDay by dayAnd cold hopes swarmLike worms withinOur living clay

I love her passionately with a morbid intensity; madly as one can only love a woman who never responds to our love with anything but an eternally uniform, eternally calm, stony smile.

I can't stop thinking about what Caroline said to Minna about death. It isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing - we've made it our own. Or maybe it's life that's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleaning, a cure.

They'll torture you for months before killing you if you run" Otis shrugged, as if this was an everyday occurrence.

Honestly, I'd rather be anywhere else. Even home, where my dad begins almost every conversation with, "You should lose the black clothes and wear something with color." Puh-lease. Like I want to look like every Barbie clone in Hell High, a.k.a. Oklahoma's insignificant Haloway High School. Ironically, Dad doesn't appreciate the bright blue streaks in my originally blond/now-dyed-black hair. Go figure. That's color, right?

There's nothing like a headless corpse to bring a touch of excitement into one's life.

That rational voice was right to be frightened. There's something in us that is very much attracted to madness. Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.

DEATH COMES SLOWLY LIKE ANTS TO A FALLEN FIG

The only time you were safe was when you were dead.

What does it matter what people do? At the end of the day we're all dead.

Being me is a job — is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn’t something people give away and then there’s drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That’s a full-time occupation: that’s like being a miner, or a nurse.

The ship told you the guilty systems recognizes no innocents. I'd say it does. It recognizes the innocence... only to violate it.