Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these?
-William Shakespeare

Civilization is hideously fragile. there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.  -C. P. Snow

i don’t believe in evil, i believe in horror. in nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror, the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots. -isak dinesen

the world goes whispering to its own
“this anguish pierces to the bone;”
and tender friends go sighing round,
“what love can ever cure this wound?”
my days go on, my days go on,
-e.b. browning

a considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside., that is, they are actually already dead. it is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. if we knew what a number of these people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror. -george gurdjief

we all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. but our task is not to unleash them upon the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. -albert camus

part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. i not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. -c.s.lewis

modern man must descend the spiral of his own absurdity to the lowest point; only then can he look beyond it. it is obviously impossible to get around it, jump over it, or simply avoid it. -vaclav havel

a despairing humanity is not merely an unhappy humanity; it is an ugly humanity.. ugly in its own eyes - dwarfed, diminished, stunted, and self-loathing. these are the buried sources of world war and despotic collectivism, of scapegoat hatred and exploitation. ugly hates beautiful,, hates gentle, hates loving, hates life. there is a politics of despair. -theodore roszak

when i die i want to decompose in a barrel of porter and have it served in all the pubs in dublin. -j.p.dunleavy

we are close to dead. there are faces and bodies like gorged maggots on the dance floor, on the highway, in the city, in the stadium: they are a host of chemical machines who swallow the product of chemical factories, aspirin, preservatives, stimulant, relaxant, and breathe out their chemical wastes into a polluted air. the sense of a long last night over civilization is back again. -norman mailer

dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives. -elisabeth kuber-ross

if man merely sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. why, he might ask himself, should he bother to write a great symphony, or strive to make a living, or even to love another, when he is no more than a momentary microbe on a dust mote whirling through the unimaginable immensity of space? -stanley kubrick

the whole race is a poet who writes down propositions of its fate. -wallace stevens

the freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult to access. people who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent are seen daily on the newsstands, on tv, in the subways. hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair. -susan sontag

i’m tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. that’s deep enough. what do you want- an adorable pancreas? -jean kerr.

men tied fast to the absolute, bled of their differences, drained of their dreams by authoritarian leeches until nothing but pulp is left, become a massive, sick thing whose sheer weight is used ruthlessly by ambitious men. here is the real enemy of our people: our own selves dehumanized into “the masses.” and where is the david who can slay this giant? -lillian smith

life is like sanskrit read to a pony. -lou reed

He who fights against monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you stare persistently into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you. -Friedrich Nietzsche

a lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind. -john cheever

the usefulness of madmen is famous: they demonstrate society’s logic flagrantly carried out down to its last scrimshaw scarp. -cynthia ozick

we are all born mad, some remain so. -samuel beckett

in an expanding universe, time is on the side of the outcast. those who once inhabited the suburbs of human contempt find that without changing their address they eventually live in the metropolis. -quentin crisp

the human head is bigger than the globe. it conceives itself as containing more. it can think and rethink itself and ourselves from any desired point outside the gravitational pull of the earth. it starts by writing one thing and later reads itself as something else. the human head is monstrous. -gunter grass

man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is. -albert camus

The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

when the beginnings of self-destruction enter the heart it seems no bigger than a grain of sand. -john cheever

the lives of happy people are dense with their own doings - crowded, active thick… but the sorrowing are nomads, on a plain with few landmarks and no boundaries; sorrow’s horizons are vague and its demands are few. -larry mcmurty

one of the most horrible, yet most important, discoveries of our age has been that, if you really wish to destroy a person and turn him into an automaton, the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relationship to life without intermission. -w.h. auden

Considered physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually reduces his strength. The effect of ugliness can be measured with a dynamometer. Whenever anyone feels depressed, he senses the proximity of something “ugly.” His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride—they decline with ugliness. -Friedrich Nietzsche

i seated ugliness on my knee, and almost immediately grew tired of it. -Salvador dali

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men. -Jean-Paul Sartre

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable
dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in
armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
-Allen Ginsberg

*all images from les monstres de la renaissance à l’âge classique.