Gruesome Quotes

As to the number of novels I've abandoned ... I shudder to think. I have thrown away five completed novels, and that's a gruesome enough figure. But not necessarily a waste of effort. ~ Mark Haddon

I have an irrational fear that I'm going to have a gruesome and untimely death because so many wonderful things are happening to me. ~ Margot Robbie

I've been on two tours. I've seen limbs blown off, bones protruding ... smashed, I've seen the incomplete bodies of children brought in and out of my helo. I've seen intestines on the outside of a man's body more than once. I've seen eyeballs hanging from their sockets. I've seen grown men bawling and begging for their moms to save them from the death they knew was just minutes away. I've seen horrible. The woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with died in my arms, and then again when I put a bullet in her brain. That was fucking gruesome. ~ Jamie McGuire

Donnelley was lifting his shirt away from the torn flesh in his side. He was cranked around, trying to assess the damage in the muck-spotted mirror. To Vero, he looked like an expressionist painting in which all the objects were the same color of too-vivid red: the shirt, the hands holding the shirt, the belt bassing through pant loops. At the center of it all was the thing that corrupted its surroundings with its own gruesome color - a wound. ~ Robert Liparulo

Mine is a gruesome job, but for a scientist with a love for the mechanics of the human body, a great one. ~ Judy Melinek

Brains are the only things that stand between a living person and a gruesome death. Or maybe brains and Kevlar. ~ Mira Grant

Why do we take pleasure in gruesome death, neatly packaged as a puzzle to which we may find a satisfactory solution through clues - or if we are not clever enough, have it revealed by the all-powerful tale-teller at the end of the book? It is something to do with being reduced to, and comforted by, playing by the rules. ~ A.S. Byatt

Perhaps September 11 could be called the first historic world event in the strictest sense: the impact, the explosion, the slow collapse - a gruesome reality literally took place in front of a global public. ~ Jurgen Habermas

I don't like raccoons. They look ... shifty, with their little burglar masks and everything. Also, they carry rabies. Can I catch rabies? Probably not. All the same, it sounds gruesome - and I think we all know that cute, fuzzy woodland creatures are not to be trusted on general principle. ~ Cherie Priest

All I had to do was stick my face into this gruesome mess and bite off the young sheep's testicles. Dag a hogget. I had good teeth. I put my nose into this awful-smelling mess, my teeth solidly around the balls of the six-month-old sheep, and took a bite while I held him upside down. My nose was in fur and ordure. I bit and spat out the product into a pile of what they called prairie oysters. We have them in America too: delicious to eat, but not delicious to remove. They said this was the most sanitary way to de-ball a sheep. After I was done, I passed the sheep onto the next man, who put a little coal tar on the same spot for purposes of cleansing and closing up the wound.
The sheep never let out a bleat. ~ Errol Flynn

I loved fairy tales when I was a kid. Grimm. The grimmer the better. I loved gruesome gothic tales and, in that respect, I liked Bible stories, because to me they were very gothic. ~ Amy Tan

Dying nowadays is more gruesome in many ways, namely, more lonely, mechanical, and dehumanized; at times it is even difficult to determine technically when the time of death has occurred. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

Realize that people are hypocrites. The sooner you accept this fact the better. I NEVER sensor my stories. I NEVER sacrifice historical accuracy for sake of political correctness. And I apologize for nothing because I've noticed a sense of hypocrisy in regard to writing. People will buy a Stephen King book and read 900 pages of gruesome murder, graphic sex, and sometimes even kid fu**ing. And they will praise his artistic genius and buy his next filthy book. Then the same people will want to sensor every line I put on the page. To hell with that. I'm an artist too. ~ Catalina DuBois

When I arrived at the graveyard, Silla and her brother were sitting together snacking on cookies. They both wore jeans and sweaters and had blood on their foreheads. Like a gruesome splotch jerking you out of an otherwise pastoral scene. That happened to be a cemetery. Okay, it was all pretty gruesome. ~ Tessa Gratton

Alchemy is glorious, gritty, and gruesome, forcing one to mature spiritually."

-from my weblog posted today on diavirginia.com ~ Dia Virginia Rigden

Lack of interest in mission is not fundamentally caused by an absence of compassion or commitment, nor by lack of information or exhortation. And lack of interest in mission is not remedied by more shocking statistics, more gruesome stories or more emotionally manipulative commands to obedience. It is best remedied by intensifying peoples' passion for Christ, so that the passions of his heart become the passions that propel our hearts. ~ Tim A. Dearborn

He stared at her a moment, and then one side of his mouth turned up. "You are a harsh negotiator, Mrs. Ackerley - forgive me - Lady Ian. Do the decadent Mackenzies know what has descended among them?"
"I find the decadent Mackenzies quite gentlemanly.
They care deeply about one another, have been kind to me, and love their dogs."
Fellows looked unimpressed. "Are you certain you wish to hear the story? Some bits are gruesome."
"Be remorseless, Inspector. ~ Jennifer Ashley

But, as in American Sniper, the effect of depicting violence in such a gruesome, realistic way amplifies the sense of awe around masculinity: a man is defined by his willingness to use violence when he must, an even more serious duty when such violence is shown in an unsanitized, realistic, gruesome way. ~ Anonymous

He was a beautiful pagan god with the voice of a serial killer, but that didn't make him any less god like. It just meant rather than dying in some dank basement or isolated cabin, I'd die bound on an altar as part of some gruesome sacrificial rite. Exsanguinating while he stood over my naked body with my blood dripping from an obsidian blade...Angelina Martin ~ Candace Vianna

I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012 ... And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there. ~ Isabel Allende

A student researching into my work has actually traced the newspapers and magazines where I found theses images and has found out that many of them illustrate a collection of gruesome stories, murders and suicides which contrast with the images used. There is a contrast between the message carried by the text and that suppressed by the illustration. ~ Gerhard Richter

Isn't it true that you start your life a sweet child believing in everything under your father's roof? Then comes the day of the Laodiceans, when you know you are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked, and with the visage of a gruesome grieving ghost you go shuddering through nightmare life. ~ Jack Kerouac

I did love her, though, for a little while anyhow. That was the thing: I still believed, on some fundamental level, that love would cure me. That if only I were loved deeply enough by someone else, I would be content to stay a man. It wouldn't be my authentic life, but it would be all right. It was better, in any case, than coming out as transsexual, taking hormones, and having some gruesome operation and walking around like Herman Munster. An authentic life wasn't very appealing. And so I allowed myself to be lifted off the ground by the levitating properties of romantic love. ~ Jennifer Finney Boylan

Roth grinned then. Anyway, back to me. I'm all better and I am back. He slid me a sly look that made me want to punch him instead of cry into my pillow like a baby. I'm sure I was missed. He took a big bite of the hamburger and grinned around the mouthful. A lot.
I didn't know what happened that switched my emotions so fast. The hurt his rejection had left behind exploded into rage- like the head-spinning, spraying-green-vomit kind of rage. My brain kicked off. I wasn't thinking as I reached over and plucked the hamburger right out of his hand.
Twisting at the waist, I threw the hamburger on the floor behind Roth as hard as I could. The satisfactory splat it made as ketchup and mayo splattered like a gruesome burger massacre brought a wide smile to my face. ~ Jennifer L. Armentrout

Given the gruesome fate of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, and his family, and the fact that five of the previous 12 Romanov rulers were also murdered, it is easy to regard Russia's imperial dynasty as cursed. ~ Saul David

And you're right, I do love you Eden. I will follow you into eternity, or until after this weekend when we all die gruesome, painful deaths ... But with every breath I have left, I will use it to love you. Because, Eden, I want this ... You; I want you more than life, more than anything. There was a time when I didn't think I was strong enough to face you again, or what is between us. I was too afraid of the heartache, of being shattered again. But now, it doesn't matter, nothing matters except you. I will take an eternity of hardship, of war or fighting my father, or anything, just to hold your love again. You are everything to me, my sun, my moon, the air I breathe. Nothing exists accept you. I love you. ~ Rachel Higginson

The fact that a crime might have been committed with impunity in the past may make it seem more familiar and less gruesome, but surely does not give it any greater legitimacy. ~ Jonathan Kozol

I'd bought a lot of really challenging, cutting-edge Joel-Peter Witkin photographs very early on. There were severed heads and amputated feet and hands in them - gruesome stuff. I had them all around the house, and if someone couldn't relate to it in some artistic way and instead just said "Yuck," then there probably wouldn't have been anywhere for us to go. ~ Richard Gere

Greger gave us a faraway look.
'Now you'rrre getting somewhere, lads! This is Holgerrri.'
I turned to Niila and muttered a gruesome premonition:
'By God, but he's going to get beaten up.
'What?' said Greger
'Oh, nothing. ~ Mikael Niemi

Look at the immigrants coming to America looking for a better life. What they got now? If they had the misfortune to be successful one of the most gruesome cultural straightjackets in history. ~ William S. Burroughs

I am only interested in bad taste if I can enjoy a gruesome tango or watch a movie that makes me cry. ~ Manuel Puig

Thursday? Oh no, it can't be! It's too gruesome. ~ Audrey Hepburn

He stared down at her for a moment, wanting to heal every
cut on her soft skin. But he couldn't, not yet. He needed to get her,
and her car, far from this place so neither he nor Kate would be
implicated in any way with the gruesome murder site.
It also meant he would have to drive.
In all his years, he had never driven an automobile. The closest he
had come was watching various assistants through the years as they
chauffeured him. He wasn't sure he could even remember how to
start the car, but right now he had no choice.
Grudgingly, he got into the driver's seat, and finding the lever
underneath, he pushed it back so he sat comfortably behind the
wheel. After trying three different keys, he found one that slipped into
the ignition.
From what he had seen over the past hundred years, driving was
not a complex operation, and he was an immortal with reflexes far
more keen than a human man.
How difficult could it be?
He turned the key and nearly jerked the wheel off the steering
column when the car surprised him by lurching forward. The car went
silent. The engine wasn't running. What was he doing wrong?
He stared at the gearshift, wondering if he should move it. His
frustration reared up, but his agitation would not make the car drive
itself. He had to keep a cool head.
Not knowing what else to try, he pushed one of the pedals at his
feet to the floor and turne ~ Lisa Kessler

Islamic jihadists making sacrifices tended to create gruesome headlines.--Titus Ray, Chapter 29 ~ Luana Ehrlich

Then I Curt - a mirage in the distance. He's leaning against my locker surrounded by a small group of senior Goth kids. They're gathered around him in the same manner people gather around a gruesome car accident, gaping unbashedly, black figures profiled against red lockers, staring in a daze at what they could become(Going 29-30). ~ K.L. Going

Have you ever been in love?"
"Colin. For the love of God."
"I have," he said bluntly. "And when you lose love, it tears a hole out of you. The pain can be gruesome. I thought I lost Madeline once, and I swear for a few days I thought I might never be whole again."
"Perhaps you should write a poem about it. Add another verse to your song. ~ Julie Anne Long

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

Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

This is life, in all its gruesome, lovely, neon-lit glory. ~ Nuala Casey

Could he really do the gruesome things he does to her and believe at the same time that he's acting out of love? Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? ~ Sally Rooney

It was astonishing how loudly one laughed at tales of gruesome things, of war's brutality-I with the rest of them. I think at the bottom of it was a sense of the ironical contrast between the normal ways of civilian life and this hark-back to the caveman code. It made all our old philosophy of life monstrously ridiculous. It played the "hat trick" with the gentility of modern manners. Men who had been brought up to Christian virtues, who had prattled their little prayers at mothers' knees, who had grown up to a love of poetry, painting, music, the gentle arts, over-sensitized to the subtleties of half-tones, delicate scales of emotion, fastidious in their choice of words, in their sense of beauty, found themselves compelled to live and act like ape-men; and it was abominably funny. They laughed at the most frightful episodes, which revealed this contrast between civilized ethics and the old beast law. The more revolting it was the more, sometimes, they shouted with laughter, especially in reminiscence, when the tale was told in the gilded salon of a French chateau, or at a mess-table.

It was, I think, the laughter of mortals at the trick which had been played on them by an ironical fate. They had been taught to believe that the whole object of life was to reach out to beauty and love, and that mankind, in its progress to perfection, had killed the beast instinct, cruelty, blood-lust, the primitive, savage law of survival by tooth and claw and club and ax. All poetr ~ Phillip Gibbs

As a child, I'd always liked cowboys and Indians stories where there were two layers - gruesome in the foreground but funny in the background. ~ Anthony Browne

Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience, Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body's receiving an occasional beating - which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation. ~ Thomas Mann

He stared at her face as if he wanted to peel it off and
take it home with him.
What a gruesome thought, Rowan. ~ Lilith Saintcrow

It was a cycle of whimpers and bangs, gruesome beginnings and bloody ends. ~ Victoria Schwab

I was given a thick paperback copy of the 'Guinness Book of Records' when I was 11 years old, and I read it gluttonously, cover to cover, paying special lip-smacking attention to all the incredibly gruesome chapters about the violence of human history. ~ Russell Smith

When phobia starts to build up in the psyche of thinking humanity against a part of its own kind, there is nothing more primordial and gruesome than that, especially when we are talking about a species that is supposedly the most intelligent one on Earth. Phobias recorded in DSM do not make a person lesser human, but Islamophobia does indeed define whether a person is really a thinking and sentient sapiens or an ignorant caveman. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Without children, there is no careless play; the laughter has died. Only the gruesome reality of the day is left, an unchanging reality knowing no miracles, no breaks, no dreams. ~ Henry Martin

Smiley TV preachers might tell you that following Jesus is about being good so that God will bless you with cash and prizes, but really it's much more gruesome and meaningful. It's about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live. ~ Nadia Bolz-Weber

The people in this house, I felt, and I included myself, were like characters each from a different grim and gruesome fairy tale. None of us was in the same story. We were all grotesques, and self-riveted, but in separate narratives, and so our interactions seemed weird and richly meaningless, like the characters in a Tennessee Williams play, with their bursting unimportant, but spell-bindingly mad speeches. ~ Lorrie Moore

I can remember when I was a bit of an ETA fan myself. It was in 1973, when a group of Basque militants assassinated Adm. Carrero Blanco. The admiral was a stone-faced secret police chief, personally groomed to be the successor to the decrepit Francisco Franco. His car blew up, killing only him and his chauffeur with a carefully planted charge, and not only was the world well rid of another fascist, but, more important, the whole scheme of extending Franco's rule was vaporized in the same instant. The dictator had to turn instead to Crown Prince Juan Carlos, who turned out to be the best Bourbon in history and who swiftly dismantled Franco's entire system. If this action was 'terrorism,' it had something to be said for it. Everyone I knew in Spain made a little holiday in their hearts when the gruesome admiral went sky-high. ~ Christopher Hitchens

But my point is these Civil War songs were gruesome. The hatred that's so bad in this country today, and for the past 10 or 15 years, bad as it is, is nothing compared to the kind of things people would write down and sing back in the Civil War. ~ T Bone Burnett

Down every hall is a gruesome tangle of impossible creatures, and every one of them is split open or strung with barbs or dragging their insides after them, flailing along on shattered limbs or shredded wings or blasted stumps.
I've got the pistol, half a can of spray and a handful of useless shotgun slugs.
I'm dead. ~ Bill Blais

You must show how gruesome that death is because if you don't, then you turn into some kind of comic book and pain, then death, doesn't have a consequence, and pain doesn't have a consequence. ~ Joe Eszterhas

And if the worst, or best, happens, and Death comes for you in the snow, he comes disguised as Sleep, and you greet him rather as a welcome friend than a gruesome foe. ~ Apsley Cherry-Garrard

Writing is hard. Not as hard as not writing.

Not writing is torturous, bloody, chaotic and a gruesome winless battle.

A writer who writes, knows peace, lives connected to truth.

Not writing is ache, betrayal, death of the soul and imagination. ~ Coco J. Ginger

My patient was one of those singular and unfortunate people who regard their heart ("a hollow, muscular organ," according to the gruesome definition in Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which Pnin's orphaned bag contained) with a queasy dread, a nervous repulsion, a sick hate, as if it were some strong slimy untouchable monster that one had to be parasitized with, alas. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

There were relatives of their victims among the Hogwarts students, who now found themselves the unwilling objects of a gruesome sort of reflected fame as they walked the corridors: Susan Bones, whose uncle, aunt, and cousins had all died at the hands of one of the ten, said miserably during Herbology that she now had a good idea what it felt like to be Harry.
"And I don't know how you stand it- it's horrible" she said bluntly. ~ J.K. Rowling

In those moments, which were eternal I assure you, I had no location in the universe, nothing to grasp for that minimum of security which every creature needs merely to exist without suffering from the sensation that everything is spinning ever faster on a cosmic carousel with only endless blackness at the edge of that wheeling ride. I know that your condition differs from mine, and therefore you have no means by which to fully comprehend my ordeals just as I cannot fully comprehend yours. But I do acknowledge that both our conditions are unendurable, despite the doctor's second-hand platitude that nothing in this world is unendurable. I've even come to believe that the world itself, by its very nature, is unendurable. It's only our responses to this fact that deviate: mine being predominately a response of passive terror approaching absolute panic; yours being predominantly a response of gruesome obsessions that you fear you might act upon. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Ageing, slightly mad and on the threshold of retirement, it was an uneasy combination and it was no wonder that people shied away from her or made only the most perfunctory remarks. It was difficult to imagine what her retirement would be like - impossibe and rather gruesome to speculate on it. ~ Barbara Pym

Often, one discovery leads to interest in another. After the Dauphin's heart had undergone DNA testing and was placed in the crypt at St. Denis, I think people wanted some closure to the story about the fate of the royal couple's only child who survived the gruesome Temple Prison. I know I did. ~ Susan Nagel

There is no kind way to rip the skin off animals' backs. Anyone who wears any fur shares the blame for the torture and gruesome deaths of millions of animals each year. ~ Natalie Imbruglia

Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to forsee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. Trusting in this weak magic, he invented, so that they would not happen, the most gruesome details. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

More than ten thousand people had been on board the Gustloff. The gruesome details of the sinking would be reported in every world newspaper. The tragedy would be studied for years, become legendary. ~ Ruta Sepetys

It was nothing I hadn't thought of, plenty, and in far less taxing circumstances; the urge shook me grandly and unpredictably, a poisonous whisper that never wholly left me, that on some days lingered just on the threshold of my hearing but on others roared up uncontrollably into a sort of lurid visionary frenzy, why I wasn't sure, sometimes even a bad movie or a gruesome dinner party could trigger it, short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light ~ Tartt

I fear that even if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that purpose - that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. ~ Dave Eggers

It is a well-worn truth that cops grow callous, a cliché so tattered that it is even common on television. All cops face things every day that are so gruesome, brutal, and bizarre that no normal human being could deal with them on a daily basis and stay sane. And so they learn not to feel, to grow and maintain a poker-faced whimsy toward all the surprising things their fellow humans find to do to each other. All cops practice not-feeling, and it may be that Miami cops are better at it than others, since they have so many opportunities to learn. ~ Jeff Lindsay

And the cancer deaths of those harder to describe as losers, like Freud and Wittgenstein, have been diagnosed as the gruesome penalty exacted for a lifetime of instinctual renunciation. (Few remember that Rimbaud died of cancer.) ~ Susan Sontag

It's much harder to say "I'm going to kill three of the biggest characters in your universe in a gruesome bloodbath." There can be a lot of differing opinions in a mainstream comic book, you know? "Rogue would never do this!" But I can say, "No, Rogue suffered the death of Charles Xavier and it broke her down and she stumbled into a dark place and she started fixating on the Scarlet Witch as the cause of it all" - which, there is a logical chain of events that lead to the Scarlet Witch. And in the confusion, she thought Wanda was up to doing it again and she did what she thought was best. ~ Rick Remender

The beasts' gruesome growls and roars unmistakably sounded like a dare. ~ A.O. Peart

General Mario Vargas Salinas, now retired from Bolivia's Eighth Army Division, was one of the young army officers present at Guevara's burial. It was his duty to accompany an old dump truck carrying the bodies of the six dead rebels, including that of "Che" Guevara, to the airstrip in Vallegrande, Bolivia. Knowing that the facts surrounding the burials were leaking out, he decided that after 28 years the world should know what had happened to "Che" Guevara's body. At the time, Captain Vargas, who had also led the ambush in which Tamara "Tania" Bunke, Guevara's lover, was shot dead, said that Guevara was buried early on the morning of October 11th, 1967, at the end of the town's landing strip. After the gruesome facts became known, the Bolivian government ordered the army to find Guevara's remains for a proper burial.
General Gary Prado Salmón, retired, had been the commander of the unit that had captured Guevara. He confirmed General Vargas' statement and added that the guerrilla fighters had been burned, before dumping their bodies into a mass grave, dug by a bulldozer, at the end of the Vallegrande airstrip. He explained that the body of "Che" Guevara had been buried in a separate gravesite under the runway. The morning after the burials, "Che" Guevara's brother arrived in Vallegrande, hoping to see his brother's remains. Upon asking, he was told by the police that it was too late. Talking to some of the army officers, he was told lies or perhaps just differing account ~ Hank Bracker

My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read ... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion. ~ Ann Cleeves

There are details about your life I really do not want to know about. You told me he taught you how to fight with weapons, but I guess I never ... "
"Put two and two together?" Katie grinned. "That's not like you, detective Jules."
"I know. I guess I overlooked the gory details. Blood and guts have never been my forte. I like action. Give me Mission Impossible and CSI, but leave out the gruesome details."
They stopped upon reaching the entrance to the barn. "Roller skating disco lover turns FBI crime scene investigator. I think there's a book waiting to be written for you. ~ Mary Abshire

Clavain looked around the room, taking in the gruesome menagerie of wraithlike seniors, wizened elders and obscene glass-bottled end-state Conjoiners. They were all hanging on his answer, even the visible brains seeming to hesitate in their wheezing pulsations. ~ Alastair Reynolds

History has to live with what was here,
clutching and close to fumbling all we had -
it is so dull and gruesome how we die,
unlike writing, life never finishes. ~ Robert Lowell

If he were cast in my Zombie version of Vampire Diaries, he so would have been Stefan, the very brother I wanted to watch die of something grotesque and gruesome. Team Daemon every single day. ~ Rachel Higginson

My feelings for Raphael are mine, and mine alone. I loved him, and that is all anyone needs to know. The rest is no business of any man's. ~ John Connolly

Spader and I were nearly killed. Three times. We were also robbed and witnessed a gruesome murder. Happy birthday to me! ~ D.J. MacHale

My favourite part is when GreenHollyWood says to don't lie and then he lies to my mother... so far it's pretty interesting part... He skipped that he was screaming at me, as a second that he was at level rage and fill with anger...
So far that part was skipped and so far I was the dot in the circle, he was the innocent in that circle. ~ Deyth Banger

Knowing Miss Hisselpenny's constitution, if the mummy were gruesome enough, dinner might just be revisited. ~ Gail Carriger

'Family Life' is a blueprint of my life. It was horrible and physically gruesome in a way the book doesn't attempt to capture. It was emotionally very bleak. ~ Akhil Sharma

ISIS itself regularly fuels hatred of gay people and violence towards them. It broadcasts gruesome executions of homosexuals thrown blindfolded from rooftops. ~ George Takei

The top two movies at the box office this weekend were 'High School Musical 3' and 'Saw V.'
One movie features gruesome onscreen torture that is difficult to watch and the other is about a guy with a saw. ~ Conan O'Brien

Well, hell. It was a lot harder not to stiffen for that one, but he steadied his breathing and kept holding her, all the while planning Jimmy Mondo's death in gruesome and excruciating detail in his head. He'd need to talk to Chad about how to hide a body - he was pretty sure Chad knew that sort of thing. ~ Lori Ryan

It strikes me as gruesome and comical that in our culture we have an expectation that man can always solve his problems ... This is so untrue that it makes me want to cry-or laugh. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

This was supposed to be the Presidential Suite," she said, gazing into the room at the holes in the wall.
well, even presidents get shot," I said.
I was just going to say that myself," she said, smiling. "But I didn't want to scare you."
I didn't know whether this was interesting
that we were both thinking the same gruesome thing
or even whether it was actually the case. Perhaps it was just rhetorical ESP: Kreskin's Guide to Etiquette. But even if it was true, that we were about to say the same thing, did this connect us in some deep private way? Or was it just a random obviousness shared between strangers? The deeper life between two people I had yet to read with confidence. It seemed a kind of vaporous text that kept revising its very alphabet. An exfoliating narrative, my professors would probably say. The paratext of the possible. ~ Lorrie Moore

Oh, and I died horribly at your hands. Gruesome murder is always a foundation for a beautiful friendship! ~ S.J. Kincaid

How do you turn catastrophe into art? Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We'll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assissinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for. ~ Julian Barnes

Q. This may be a bit gruesome, but ... if someone's DNA suddenly vanished, how long would that person last? ~ Randall Munroe

Attention, God the Judge, God the Father, who Art in Heaven, give me one miracle, please. If You exist as I know You do, even if no one else in the world believes in You, please give me a brain tumor. Please tear my limbs from their sockets and let the backseat and my older sister be totally covered with blood. Please make me dumb and blind and deaf, please make me a martyr, please, dear heavenly Father. Tear my heart right from my chest. Drive spikes into my eyes and let hot lava shoot out of my mouth. Make me silent and thoroughly dead, but please hurry. Before we get home, before we reach the next stoplight, let the only sound be no sound, the silence of my death burning in the empty sky. If You are a mighty and true God, if You are not just a dream I have made up, please, before another hour, another minute passes, let the wire in my bra poke through my heart. Dear Lord, please, please, give me this one miracle. I have begged You every day, every evening, so please, let Your will be done, let Your will be done. Give me a gruesome death as fast as You possibly can. Thank you, God. Amen. ~ Joe Meno

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS

Before you were born,
And were still too tiny for
The human eye to see,
You won the race for life
From among 250 million competitors.
And yet,
How fast you have forgotten
Your strength,
When your very existence
Is proof of your greatness.
You were born a winner,
A warrior,
One who defied the odds
By surviving the most gruesome
Battle of them all.
And now that you are a giant,
Why do you even doubt victory
Against smaller numbers,
And wider margins?
The only walls that exist,
Are those you have placed in your mind.
And whatever obstacles you conceive,
Exist only because you have forgotten
What you have already
Achieved. ~ Suzy Kassem

The two of them carefully stepped around the crime scene, picking up Nick's arms, legs and organs, and brought them back to his head. They placed his extremities into position, and then pieced in the gorier bits, assembling a gruesome jigsaw puzzle. In a few moments, most of Nick's body was in place.
The healing process took about twenty minutes. Elphaba and John stood spellbound as they watched a bloody collection of body parts reintegrate into a human form.
As Nick's sinews, nerves, and muscle knit back into place, the gaping wound in Esperto's body also closed, completing a few minutes before Nick's healing. The panther form quickly shrank back to housecat just as Nick sat up. Esperto jumped in his lap and licked the remnants of blood off his face.
"Thank you Esperto," Nick said. He looked at Elphaba and John. "Well, that could have gone better. ~ Abramelin Keldor

She thumped her weapon (others might call it a cane, but he
knew better) against the floor. "Fell off your horse?"
"No, I - "
"Tripped down the stairs? Dropped a bottle on your foot?" Her
expression grew sly. "Or does it involve a woman?"
He fought the urge to cross his arms. She was looking up at him
with a bit of a smirk. She liked poking fun at her companions; she'd
once told him that the best part of growing old was that she could
say anything she wanted with impunity.
He leaned down and said with great gravity, "Actually, I was
stabbed by my valet."
It was, perhaps, the only time in his life he'd managed to stun
her into silence.
Her mouth fell open, her eyes grew wide, and he would have
liked to have thought that she even went pale, but her skin had such
an odd tone to begin with that it was hard to say. Then, after a
moment of shock, she let out a bark of laughter and said, "No,
really. What happened?"
"Exactly as I said. I was stabbed." He waited a moment, then
added, "If we weren't in the middle of a ballroom, I'd show you."
"You don't say?" Now she was really interested. She leaned in,
eyes alight with macabre curiosity. "Is it gruesome?"
"It was," he confirmed.
She pressed her lips together, and her eyes narrowed as she
asked, "And where is your valet now?"
"At Chatteris House, likely nicking a glass of my best brandy."
She let out anoth ~ Julia Quinn

We need you to do some reconnaissance. A simple flyby over our ranch. All you have to do is count the cars and tell us how many men you see hanging around the property."
Kai shook his head without a moment's hesitation. "Not even if you fed me your firstborn, still wet and screaming."
I blinked, but for a long moment, his words made no sense. Not the refusal. The part about cannibalizing my theoretical future child. "Well, isn't that ... gruesome? Who are you, Rumpelstiltskin?"
Kai frowned, as if I made no sense to him. "No thunderbird would claim a name so senselessly flamboyant. ~ Rachel Vincent

In the context of 1948, 1984 seemed dreadfully convincing. But tyrants, after all, are mortal and circumstances change. Recent developments in Russia and recent advances in science and technology have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude. A nuclear war will, of course, make nonsense of everybody's predictions. But, assuming for the moment that the Great Powers can somehow refrain from destroying us, we can say that it now looks as though the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than of something like 1984. ~ Aldous Huxley

It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these
the still moments, as he called them to himself
they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible. ~ Diana Gabaldon

In today's world, terrorists are the most significant practitioners of the art of inducing availability cascades. With a few horrible exceptions such as 9/11, the number of casualties from terror attacks is very small relative to other causes of death. Even in countries that have been targets of intensive terror campaigns, such as Israel, the weekly number of casualties almost never came close to the number of traffic deaths. The difference is in the availability of the two risks, the ease and the frequency with which they come to mind. Gruesome images, endlessly repeated in the media, cause everyone to be on edge. As ~ Daniel Kahneman

It's three turns in the stocks for you," Cassandra told him.
"Clapped in the stocks, merely for breaking the Sabbath?" West asked indignantly.
"It's a severe game," Cassandra said. "It was invented at the turn of the century, and back then you could be put in the stocks or hanged even for stealing a piece of bacon."
"How do you know that?" Rhys asked.
"We have a book about it in the library," Pandora said. "'Crimes Of Fallen Humanity.' It's all about terrible criminals and horrid gruesome punishments."
"We've read it at least three times," Cassandra added. ~ Lisa Kleypas

I always kind of wanted to be on 'CSI.' I'm kind of addicted to that show right now. I've never gotten to die in something, and I know that's a little gruesome, but I just think it would be really fun - I'd make it as dramatic as possible. ~ Ashley Leggat

But once again, Pim surprised me. She smiled with a gruesome red grin pulling the trigger for the second time ~ Pepper Winters