#orr

Today will die tomorrow. ↗

— Algernon Charles Swinburne

#future #present #time #today #tomorrow

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul, that soft summer morning round a turning in the path, the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones, its legs in the air like a woman in need burning its wedding poisons like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs, I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound, but I touch my body in vain to find the wound. I am the vampire of my own heart, one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter who can no longer smile. Am I dead? I must be dead. ↗

— Charles Baudelaire

#death #horror #murder #poetry #primal-scene

Last reason for reading horror: it’s a rehearsal for death. It’s a way to get ready. People say there’s nothing sure but death and taxes. But that’s not really true. There’s really only death, you know. Death is the biggie. Two hundred years from now, none of us are going to be here. We’re all going to be someplace else. Maybe a better place, maybe a worse place; it may be sort of like New Jersey, but someplace else. The same thing can be said of rabbits and mice and dogs, but we’re in a very uncomfortable position: we’re the only creatures—at least as far as we know, though it may be true of dolphins and whales and a few other mammals that have very big brains—who are able to contemplate our own end. We know it’s going to happen. The electric train goes around and around and it goes under and around the tunnels and over the scenic mountains, but in the end it always goes off the end of the table. Crash. ↗

— Stephen King

#horror #reading #death

Death's gruesome face taunts: soulless eyes, crimson grimace. I really hate clowns. ↗

— Katherine Applegate

#horror #death

Fear of death is form of stasis horrors. The dead weight of time. ↗

— William S. Burroughs

#horrors #stasis #time #death

And she arose from her deathbed in a gossamer gown, with eyes the color of starlight and hair as black as the night. And those who were her captors trembled, for the scent of death and madness emanated from her soul, and yet she was not dead. She moved like the spiders that creep in the treetops, and none could look away. Taking her first captor in hand, she fed deep and ravenous. And so it was that Myst, Queen of the Indigo Court, was born from the blood of the dead. ↗

— Yasmine Galenorn

#horror #vampires #death

Everyone knows they're going to die but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently. ↗

— Mitch Albom

#living #mitch #morrie #tuesdays-with-morrie #death

Only the previous day, Arch had found him in a spirit-dance corral, blistering the creatures to the point of death, such was his need to touch and destroy. ↗

— Frank Beddor

#blister #corral #dance #death #destroy

And like that, I said goodbye to my grandmother like we were two people who met in a coffee shop, shared a lifetime of stories and left wanting more, but knowing we’d meet there again. ↗

— Darnell Lamont Walker

#family #grandmother #sorrow #death

Rhianon, he said, hold my hand, Rhianon. She did not hear him, but stood over his bed and fixed him with an unbroken sorrow. Hold my hand, he said, and then: why are your putting the sheet over my face? ↗

— Dylan Thomas

#rhianon #sorrow #the-visitor #death