Monsters Quotes

“I do not sleep because I am not only afraid of the monsters at my door, but also of the monsters my own mind can conjure. The ones that live within.”
― Samantha Shannon, The Priory of the Orange Tree

“Beware the dark pool at the bottom of our hearts. In its icy, black depths dwell strange and twisted creatures it is best not to disturb.”
― Sue Grafton, I is for Innocent

“Start by pulling him out of the fire and
hoping that he will forget the smell.
He was supposed to be an angel but they took him
from that light and turned him into something hungry,
something that forgets what his hands are for when they
aren’t shaking.
He will lose so much, and you will watch it all happen
because you had him first, and you would let the world
break its own neck if it means keeping him.
Start by wiping the blood off of his chin and
pretending to understand.
Repeat to yourself
“I won’t leave you, I won’t leave you”
until you fall asleep and dream of the place
where nothing is red.
When is a monster not a monster?
Oh, when you love it.
Oh, when you used to sing it to sleep.
Here are your upturned hands.
Give them to him and watch how he prays
like he is learning his first words.
Start by pulling him out of another fire,
and putting him back together with the pieces
you find on the floor.
There is so much to forgive, but you do not
know how to forget.
When is a monster not a monster?
Oh, when you are the reason it has become so mangled.
Here is your humble offering,
obliterated and broken in the mouth
of this abandoned church.
He has come back to stop the world
from turning itself inside out, and you love him, you do,
so you won’t let him.
Tell him that you will never know any better.”
― Caitlyn Siehl

“Some loves have to be given up, others have to be forgotten. Strange as it may sound, if you think of me as a monster, but I can love most passionately. I do not think of myself as evil.”
― Christopher Pike, The Last Vampire

“Like any normal fifth grader, I preferred my villains to be evil and stay that way, to act like Dracula rather than Frankenstein's monster, who ruined everything by handing that peasant girl a flower. He sort of made up for it by drowning her a few minutes later, but, still, you couldn't look at him the same way again.”
― David Sedaris, When You Are Engulfed in Flames

“If you are a monster, stand up.
If you are a monster, a trickster, a fiend,
If you’ve built a steam-powered wishing machine
If you have a secret, a dark past, a scheme,
If you kidnap maidens or dabble in dreams
Come stand by me.

If you have been broken, stand up.
If you have been broken, abandoned, alone
If you have been starving, a creature of bone
If you live in a tower, a dungeon, a throne
If you weep for wanting, to be held, to be known,
Come stand by me.

If you are a savage, stand up.
If you are a witch, a dark queen, a black knight,
If you are a mummer, a pixie, a sprite,
If you are a pirate, a tomcat, a wright,
If you swear by the moon and you fight the hard fight,
Come stand by me.

If you are a devil, stand up.
If you are a villain, a madman, a beast,
If you are a strowler, a prowler, a priest,
If you are a dragon come sit at our feast,
For we all have stripes, and we all have horns,
We all have scales, tails, manes, claws and thorns
And here in the dark is where new worlds are born.
Come stand by me.”
― Catherynne M. Valente

“I love zombies. If any monster could Riverdance, it would be zombies.”
― Craig Ferguson

“I’m a monster,” said the shadow of the Marquess suddenly. “Everyone says so.”

The Minotaur glanced up at her. “So are we all, dear,” said the Minotaur kindly. “The thing to decide is what kind of monster to be. The kind who builds towns or the kind who breaks them.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There

“But what if the monsters come?"
"Fancy." Kit looked away from the drama to stare at her sister, surprised. "We are the monsters.”
― Dia Reeves, Slice of Cherry

“... not all monsters look like monsters. There are some that carry their monstrosity inside.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry

“A monster. You and your friends, all of you. Pretty monsters. It's a stage all girls go through. If you're lucky you get through it without doing any permanent damage to yourself or anyone else.”
― Kelly Link, Pretty Monsters: Stories

“We don't fall in love with people because they're good people. We fall in love with people whose darkness we recognise. You can fall in love with a person for all of the right reasons, but that kind of love can still fall apart. But when you fall in love with a person because your monsters have found a home in them-- that's the kind of love that owns your skin and bones. Love, I am convinced, is found in the darkness. It is the candle in the night.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“Monsters preferred solitude.”
― Hafsah Faizal, We Hunt the Flame

“But, with time, one has encountered many of the monsters, and one is increasingly less terrified of those still to be met.”
― Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

“And if the serpent grows in monstrousness and corruption, if it poisons the land of Elfhame itself, then let me be the queen of monsters. Let me rule over that blackened land with my redcap father as a puppet by my side. Let me be feared and never again afraid.”
― Holly Black, The Queen of Nothing

“The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous”
― John le Carré

“Monsters don’t exist. It’s men you should be afraid of, not monsters.”
― Niccolò Ammaniti, I'm Not Scared

“Are you sure this isn't a nightmare? And that we won't just wake up?
Yes.
Because dreamers always wake up and leave their monsters behind.”
― Alexandra Bracken, In the Afterlight

“A monster is a person who has stopped pretending.”
― Colson Whitehead

“Be careful in the company of monsters that you don't become one.”
― Cindy Gerard, Take No Prisoners

“People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.”
― Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Last Night I Sang to the Monster

“Monsters don’t get happy endings.”
― Paula Stokes, Ferocious

“I would like you to teach [the orcs] civilised behaviour," said Ladyship coldly.

He appeared to consider this. "Yes of course, I think that would be quite possible," he said. "And who would you send to teach the humans?”
― Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

“Where there is a monster, there is a miracle.”
― Ogden Nash

“That's the beautiful thing about innocence; even monsters have a pocketful of childhood memories with which to seek comfort with.”
― Dave Matthes, Sleepeth Not, the Bastard

“That was the thing to remember about all monsters, They love to frighten
people, but the minute you stare them down, they turn tail and run.”
― Jeanette Walls

“You can't stop a soldier from being frightened but you can give him motivation to help him overcome that fear. I have no such motivation. I can't have. I'm a witcher: an artificially created mutant. I kill monsters for money. I defend children when their parents pay me to. If Nilfgaardian parents pay me, I'll defend Nilfgaardian children. And even if the world lies in ruin - which does not seem likely to me - I'll carry on killing monsters in the ruins of this world until some monster kills me. That is my fate, my reason, my life and my attitude to the world. And it is not what I chose. It was chosen for me.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Krew elfów

“In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”
― Guillermo del Toro

“Before you can kill the monster you have to say its name.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard: Collected Non-Fiction

“It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrator or a bystander. It is tempting to say that a Nazi murderer is beyond the pale of understanding. ...Yet to deny a human being his human character is to render ethics impossible.

To yield to this temptation, to find other people inhuman, is to take a step toward, not away from, the Nazi position. To find other people incomprehensible is to abandon the search for understanding, and thus to abandon history.”
― Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin