Mutilated Quotes

The laughter of the mutilated who still need love, and her blessed eyes run deep into her head like mountain springs far in and cool and good. ~ Charles Bukowski

Feminist art may ... though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme ... should we call it 'joy'? ~ Andrea Dworkin

Animals on factory farms and slaughter houses are mutilated, drugged and abused in ways that would be illegal if dogs or cats were treated similarly. The problem is that farm animals are exempted from the Animal Welfare Act. Therefore, companies often act with impunity. ~ Bruce Friedrich

You want to feel that you can do something creative that you love without being picked apart and mutilated for other people's pleasure. ~ Sienna Miller

All were indiscriminately condemned to death; but one out of three only were really executed. Ten cannon were placed on the drilling-ground, a prisoner fastened to each of their mouths, and five times were the ten guns fired, covering the plain with mutilated remains, in the midst of air tainted with the smell of burning flesh. These men, as M. de Valbezen says in his book called "Nouvelles Etudes sur les Anglais et l'lnde," nearly all died with that heroic indifference which Indians know so well how to preserve even in the very face of death. "No need to bind me, captain," said a fine young sepoy, twenty years of age, to one of the officers present at the execution; and as he spoke he carelessly stroked the instrument of death. "No need to bind me; I have no wish to run away." Such was the first and horrible execution, which was to be followed by so many others. At ~ Jules Verne

I got my heart broken. My spirit got shattered and mutilated. I will not be coming back from this. I don't want to. ~ Henry Rollins

The female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul. ~ Aristotle.

This male-default bias goes back at least to the ancient Greeks, who kicked off the trend of seeing the female body as a 'mutilated male' body (thanks, Aristotle). The female was the male 'turned outside in'. Ovaries were female testicles (they were not given their own name until the seventeenth century) and the uterus was the female scrotum. The reason they were inside the body rather than dropped out (as in typical humans) is because of a female deficiency in 'vital heat'. The male body was an ideal women failed to live up to. ~ Caroline Criado Perez

As he dropped the last grisly fragment of the dismembered and mutilated body into the small vat of nitric acid that was to devour every trace of the horrid evidence which might easily send him to the gallows, the man sank weakly into a chair and throwing his body forward upon his great, teak desk buried his face in his arms, breaking into dry, moaning sobs. ~ Edgar Rice Burroughs

For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive. ~ Frances Farmer

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants' mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street, if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous presence. ~ Charles Dickens

It is a harsh world, indescribably cruel. It is a gentle world, unbelievably beautiful. It is a world that can make us bitter, hateful, rabid, destroyers of joy. It is a world that can draw forth tenderness from us, as we lean towards one another over broken gates. It is a world of monsters and saints, a mutilated world, but it is the only one we have been given. We should let it shock us not into hatred or anxiety, but into unconditional love. ~ Richard Holloway

She had found Rasputin to be an odd, intense man. He had been undeniably human and very likely insane, but anyone who could survive reputedly being stabbed, poisoned, shot multiple times, mutilated, and badly beaten before finally drowning, deserved a certain amount of respect. ~ Thea Harrison

In the form of the oeuvre, the actual circumstances are placed in another dimension where the given reality shows itself as that which it is. Thus it tells the truth about itself; its language ceases to be that of deception, ignorance, and submission. Fiction calls the facts by their name and their reign collapses; fiction subverts everyday experience and shows it to be mutilated and false. ~ Herbert Marcuse

As for the military advantage of such a bombardment, I simply cannot grasp it. I have seen housewives disemboweled, children mutilated; I have seen the old itinerant market crone sponge from her treasure the brains with which they were spattered. I have seen a janitor's wife come out of her cellar and douse the sullied pavement with a bucket of water, and I am still unable to understand what part these humble slaughterhouse accidents play in warfare. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

The authors of the gospels were unlettered and ignorant men and the teachings of Jesus have come to us mutilated, misstated and unintelligible. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia. ~ Simon Reynolds

To love women, to love our vaginas, to know them and touch them and be familiar with who we are and what we need. To satisfy ourselves, to teach our lovers to satisfy us, to be present in our vaginas, to speak of them out loud, to speak of their hunger and pain and loneliness and humor, to make them visible so they cannot be ravaged in the dark without great consequence, so that our center, our point, our motor, our dream, is no longer detached, mutilated, numb, broken, invisible, or ashamed. ~ Eve Ensler

The strength of the Christian system - the acid test of it - is that everything fits under the apex of the existent, infinite-personal God, and it is the only system in the world where this is true. No other system has an apex under which everything fits.That is why I am a Christian and no longer an agnostic. In all the other systems, something 'sticks out,' something cannot be included; and it has to be mutilated or ignored. But without losing his own integrity, the Christian can see everything fitting into place beneath the Christian apex of the existence of the infinite-personal God who is there (p. 81). ~ Francis A. Schaeffer

That's the good thing about being halved. One understands the sorrow of every person and thing in the world at its own incompleteness. I was whole and did not understand, and moved about deaf and unfeeling amid the pain and sorrow all round us, in places where as a whole person one would least think to find it. It's not only me ... who am a split being, but you and everyone else too. Now I have a fellowship which I did not understand, did not know before, when whole, a fellowship with all the mutilated and incomplete things in the world. ~ Italo Calvino

That which interests most people leaves me without any interest at all. This includes a list of things such as: social dancing, riding roller coasters, going to zoos, picnics, movies, planetariums, watching tv, baseball games; going to funerals, weddings, parties, basketball games, auto races, poetry readings, museums, rallies, demonstrations, protests, children's plays, adult plays ... I am not interested in beaches, swimming, skiing, Christmas, New Year's, the 4th of July, rock music, world history, space exploration, pet dogs, soccer, cathedrals and great works of Art. How can a man who is interested in almost nothing write about anything? Well, I do. I write and I write about what's left over: a stray dog walking down the street, a wife murdering her husband, the thoughts and feelings of a rapist as he bites into a hamburger sandwich; life in the factory, life in the streets and rooms of the poor and mutilated and the insane, crap like that, I write a lot of crap like that ~ Charles Bukowski

And if he had returned mutilated, ugly, full of infection and horror, she would still have loved him; fed by pity, by a sharing of pain, she would love him even more, and even more, and she would never, never have prayed to God, please let him die if he can't return to me whole and healthy and able to live a normal life ... If he had died, she would have buried her heart with him. So what the fuck is the matter with me? ~ Tony Kushner

Once a hunter met a lion near the hungry critter's lair,
and the way that lion mauled him was decidedly unfair;
but the hunter never whimpered when the surgeons, with their thread,
sewed up forty-seven gashes in his mutilated head;
and he showed the scars in triumph, and they gave him pleasant fame,
and he always blessed the lion that had camped upon his frame.
Once that hunter, absent minded, sat upon a hill of ants,
and about a million bit him, and you should have seen him dance!
And he used up lots of language of a deep magenta tint,
and apostrophized the insects in a style unfit to print.
And it's thus with worldly troubles;
when the big ones come along, we serenely go to meet them, feeling valiant, bold and strong, but the weary little worries with their poisoned stings and smarts, put the lid upon our courage, make us gray, and break our hearts. ~ Walt Mason

Little old lady got mutilated late last night, werewolves of London, again. ~ Warren Zevon

Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts. ~ Charles Fort

Taking the logic of Jinnah's demand to its extreme, Congress now offered him a 'Pakistan' stripped of the Punjab's eastern divisions (Ambala and Jullundur), Assam (except Sylhet district) and western Bengal and Calcutta - the 'mutilated and moth-eaten' Pakistan which Jinnah had rejected out of hand in 1944 and again in May 1946. Such a permanent settlement would at a stroke eject Jinnah from the centre, clear the way for a strong unitary government wholly under Congress's sway, and give away only parts of provinces which past experience had shown lay outside the Congress's ken. ~ Ayesha Jalal

We know from accounts of Rilke's life that his stay in Rodin's workshops taught him how modern sculpture had advanced to the genre of the autonomous torso. The poet's view of the mutilated body thus has nothing to do with the previous century's Romanticism of fragments and ruins; it is part of the breakthrough in modern art to the concept of the object that states itself with authority and the body that publicizes itself with authorization. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

How do I look in the dark?"
Startled, Arin glanced at him. The question had had no edges. It wasn't sleek, either. Its soft, uncertain shape suggested that Roshar truly wanted to know. In the fired red shadows, his limbs looked lax and his mutilated face met Arin's squarely. The heavy feeling that Arin carried - that specific sadness, nestled just below his collar bone, like a pendant - lessened. He said, "Like my friend."
Roshar didn't smile. When he spoke, his voice matched his expression, which was rare for him. Rarer still: his tone. Quiet and true. "You do, too. ~ Marie Rutkoski

A man hits me--I hit the man a little harder--then he won't do it again.' Unfortunately he did do it again--a little harder still. The effort to hit harder carried on the action and reaction till society, hitting hardest of all, set up a system of legal punishment, of unlimited severity. It imprisoned, it mutilated, it tortured, it killed; it destroyed whole families, and razed contumelious cities to the ground. ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms. ~ Simon Winder

Sometimes Wile wondered whether a cause could be right that needed folk burned, cut and otherwise mutilated. ~ Joe Abercrombie

One of its sources [Leaf by Niggle] was a great-limbed poplar tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner, I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it might have been accused of, such as being large and alive. I do not think it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

It is their usual reaction; they employ not words and reasoned conversation or discourse to resolve problems, but the truncheon, the jackbooted foot, or the gun. Sophistication requires more competence and skill than mere thuggery. It is a harder, loftier charge to be civilised than to let the beast in man devour man. The enlightened mind knows that all is challengeable, questions all, and thus, learns and grows. The weak, narrow mind makes its beliefs – whatever form they take – sacrosanct, defending them with violence if necessary. Political extremists, much like religious zealots, are the latter. They destroy what they cannot convert. They annihilate those they cannot control or make conform. They have found no peace in life, no love, and so promote war and division, as emotional cripples – inflicting their own pain and misery and malignant stupidity on the world. Their language binds people together, but only by stirring the darkest excesses of the soul; language of hate, and intolerance, fear and conspiracy, and the need for vengeance. In war-scarred Europe, these cripples direct mass-psychology, and would make the world in their own likeness; mutilated by violence and tribalism and hate.
They use language in its most evil, twisted form. They appeal to the lowest form of understanding, on a level I hesitate to allow for the term 'human intelligence' to be associated.

Children, fertile minds ripe for molestation. Now they will be taught what to think, not ~ Daniel S. Fletcher

My one true love. My deformed or mutilated or diseased prince charming. My unhappily ever after. My hideous future. The monstrous rest of my life. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Unchopping a Tree.

Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work.

It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the ~ W.S. Merwin

Ryder! What's taking you so long?"
"I'm on my way!" he yells back.
It feels like forever before he pushes open the door and ducks inside. Then I see why it took him so long. He's somehow got the three cats tucked under one arm and the cake plate clutched in the other hand. No spare for a flashlight or lantern--so he accomplished this all in the dark.
"Here," he says, handing off the cake to me before releasing Kirk, Spock, and Sulu into the crate and latching the door.
"Seriously, Ryder? You brought the cake?"
He shrugs. "I was hungry."
Hmm, I guess all that kissing worked up his appetite. For cake. I'm not sure if I should be offended or not. On the plus side, he doesn't look like he's about to puke. So we're making progress as far as his fear of storms goes. I guess that's something.
"Did you happen to bring a fork?" I ask, setting the plate on the makeshift tabletop.
He produces two from his pocket, holding them up triumphantly. So we eat cake while the sirens blare. Actually, it doesn't sound that bad out there. Still, the fact that we're so calm--that Ryder's so calm--should tell you how routine this is getting. As long as we don't hear that awful freight-train sound, we're good.
"What happened to the cake?" he asks between bites. "It looks like someone mutilated it while I was gone."
"Sorry," I mutter. "Guess I did some stress bingeing. You realize you're not wearing a shirt, right?"
He glances down and shrugs, his ~ Kristi Cook

It can be argued that rapists deserve to be raped, that mutilators deserve to be mutilated. Most societies, however, refrain from responding in this way because the punishment is not only degrading to those on whom it is imposed, but it is also degrading to the society that engages in the same behavior as the criminals. ~ Stephen Bright

If feminism means anything at all, women with power should be addressing their energies to help the girls and women who suffer the pain of genital mutilation, who are at risk of being murdered because of their Western lifestyle and ideas, who must ask for permission just to leave the house, who are treated no better than serfs, branded and mutilated, traded without regard to their wishes. If you are a true feminist, these women should be your first priority. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I took my mother's knife and played johnny johnny johnny on the playhouse floor. I was drunk, stabbed myself every few throws. I held my hand up and there was satisfaction at seeing my blood, the way there was when I saw the red gouges onmy face that people stared at and turned away. They were thinking I was beautiful, but they were wrong, now they could see how ugly and mutilated I was. ~ Janet Fitch

To be mulcted of our money and mutilated of our property is serious enough: to be deprived of our colon would be intolerable. ~ Eric Partridge

Despite all the videos you see from the Ministry of Defence or the Pentagon, and all the sanitised language describing smart bombs and pinpoint strikes, the scene on the ground has remained remarkably the same for hundreds of years. Craters. Burned houses. Mutilated bodies. Women weeping for children and husbands. Men for their wives, mothers children. ~ Marie Colvin

THAT Perseus always won. That's why my momhad named me after him, even if he was son of Zeus ann I was son of Posidon. The original Perseus was one of the only heros in the greek myths who got a happy ending. The others died-betrayed, mauled, mutilated, poisoned, or cursed by the gods. My mom hoped i would inherit Perseus's luck. Judging by how my life was going so far, i wasn't too optimistic. ~ Rick Riordan

All the posters on the walls All the leaflets in the streets Are mutilated, destroyed or run in rain, Their words blotted out with tears, Skins peeling from their bodies In the victorious hurricane. ~ Stephen Spender

You fought well on Mona, my Mules, but I have brought you here for a little more javelin practice.' The words carried along the line and Valerius could see men grinning at the unlikely familiarity. 'Those who stand before you have murdered, tortured and raped Roman citizens, men, women and children; innocents whose only crime was to attempt to bring civilization to this land. They butchered and mutilated your comrades of the Ninth, and the brave veterans of Colonia who fell defending the Temple of Divine Claudius.' He paused and the silence was filled by a growl, like an enormous dog gathering itself for the attack. 'We offered them our friendship, our trust and our aid, and they took all with smiles of thanks, but when we turned our backs they reached for the knife and the sword and the spear, as is their way. They believe you are already defeated.' 'No!' The massed roar carried across the valley and echoed from the banks. 'They are the true face of barbarism. They are your enemy. They show no mercy and they deserve no mercy. Give them none. For Rome!'
'For Rome!' The words erupted from ten thousand throats and Valerius felt the ice in his belly melt and the first stirrings of life return to his heart.
'For Rome,' he whispered. ~ Douglas Jackson

All I want is for you to stand here and watch the people you love be horribly mutilated. Is that too much to ask? ~ Brenna Yovanoff

This wasn't love. It was hate. And love. That fine line had been destroyed. Mutilated. ~ Madeline Sheehan

Keeda had survived the death of her Titan, murdered by a Lysander Reaver in black and white that killed them without looking twice. She survived the wracking pain of severance from the Syrgalah's great-hearted machine spirit - a soul she adored and would willingly died to defend. She'd pulled her mutilated colleague free from imminent death and bidden her dead mentor farewell. She'd even fired hopelessly a soldier sworn to kill her, who she knew she could never have harmed.

But she only started screaming when a demon embraced and said he'd come to save her life. ~ Aaron Dembski-Bowden

My 6 foot goddess
makes me laugh
the laughter of the mutilated
who still need
love ...
she has saved me
from everything that is
not here ~ Charles Bukowski

Besides, it happens fast for some people and slow for some, accidents or gravity, but we all end up mutilated. Most women know this feeling of being more and more invisible everyday. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Their lives full of canned, mutilated laughter. ~ Charles Bukowski

The human rainbow had been mutilated by machismo, racism, militarism and a lot of other isms, who have been terribly killing our greatness, our possible greatness, our possible beauty. ~ Eduardo Galeano

Has anyone you know ever been ritually mutilated because they were seen reading a book? ~ Neal Stephenson

Every so often, the gods stop laughing long enough to do something terrible. There are few facts that are not brutal. The bitter, insufficient truth is that God recovered, but fun is dead.
Alcohol: the antidote to civilization. Alcoholism is a fatal disease. But then I am not a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, because I don't want to be cured. Alcoholism is suicide with training wheels. I watch myself sinking, an inch at a time, and I spit into the eye of fate, like Doc Holliday, who died too weak to lift a playing card. My traitorous and degenerate attitude is sort of my book review of the world we live in. I resign from the human race. I declare myself null and void; folded, spindled, and mutilated.
. . .This bar is an oasis for the night people, the street people, the invisible tribe, the people who simply do not exist in the orderly world we see in Time - the weekly science fiction magazine published by the Pentagon - an orderly world which is a sanitized Emerald City populated by contented Munchkins who pay taxes to buy tanks, nerve gas, and bombers and not a world which is a bus-station toilet where the air is a chemical cocktail of cancer-causing agents, children are starving, and the daily agenda is kill or be killed.
When the world demands that you be larger than life, and you are finding it hard enough just being life-size, you can come here, in the messy hemorrhaging of reality, let your hair down, take your girdle off, and not be embarrassed by your ~ Gustav Hasford

As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across. ~ Del LaGrace Volcano

The Black is roasted, browned, burned. But he deserves to die twice instead of once. He is therefore hanged, or more exactly, what is left of the corpse is hanged. And all those who were not able to help with the cooking applaud now.

Hurrah!

When everybody has had enough, the corpse is brought down. The rope is cut into small pieces which will be sold for three or five dollars each, souvenirs and lucky charms to be quarreled over by the ladies.

"Popular justice," as they say over there, has been done. Calmed down, the crowd congratulate the "organizers," then stream away slowly and cheerfully, as if after a feast…

While on the ground, stinking of fat and smoke, a black head, mutilated, roasted, deformed, grins horribly and seems to ask the setting sun, "Is this civilization? ~ Ho Chi Minh

I have seen an entire family lifted out of poverty and into affluence by the simple boon of a broken leg. I have had people come to me on crutches, with tears in their eyes, to bless this beneficient institution. In all my experiences of life, I have seen nothing so seraphic as the look that comes into a freshly mutilated man's face when he feels in his vest pocket with his remaining hand and finds his accident ticket all right. ~ Mark Twain

Would the young men called to arms laugh
and joke and exchange hearty platitudes
in imitation of popular fiction, while they
waited to be mutilated by the stupidity and
arrogance of aged politicians? ~ Trevanian

Indeed, the very first acknowledgment (as far as I am aware) of the attraction of mutilated bodies occurs in a founding description of mental conflict. It is a passage in The Republic, Book IV, where Plato's Socrates describes how our reason may be overwhelmed by an unworthy desire, which drives the self to become angry with a part of its nature. ~ Susan Sontag

Our house is burning and we look elsewhere. Nature, mutilated and over-exploited, can no longer reconstitute itself and we refuse to admit it. Humanity is suffering. It is suffering from poor development, in the North as in the South, and we are indifferent. The Earth and humanity are in peril and we are all responsible. It is time now to open our eyes ~ Jacques Chirac

Pseudo-critics prefer to direct their remarks to the artist - Heaven forgive them - but one due rather to a common impression that such an attitude is the correct one, that all paintings should be figuratively mutilated, and that all artists are fair game, or really grateful perhaps for a few tips. ~ Walter J. Phillips

We are unalterably opposed to the presentation of the female body being stripped, bound, raped, tortured, mutilated, and murdered in the name of commercial entertainment and free speech ~ Susan Brownmiller

Dear Brothers and Sisters, Never resort to war! Never war! Above all, I think of all the children who are robbed of their hope for a better life and a decent future. Killed children, wounded children, mutilated children, orphans, children who play with remnants of war, instead of toys. Children who don't know how to smile. Please stop! I ask you with all my heart. It's time to stop. Stop it please! ~ Pope Francis

Ah, we're the infection, Sma.' He turned and sat down on the steps, looking back towards the city and the sea. 'We're the ones who're different, we're the self-mutilated, the self-mutated. This is the mainstream; we're just like very smart kids; infants with a brilliant construction kit. They're real because they live the way they have to. We aren't because we live the way we want to. ~ Iain M. Banks

The act of writing, it seems to me, makes up a shelter, allows space to what would otherwise be hidden, crossed out, mutilated. Sometimes writing can work toward a reparation, making a sheltering space for the mind. Yet it feeds off ruptures, tears in what might otherwise seem a seamless, oppressive fabric. ~ Meena Alexander

It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. ~ Salman Rushdie

Double-clicking on his inbox, Jason noted that one of the three messages was from Suzy, aka ButterfliesInMyTummy, and his mood lifted. It was the fourth or fifth message they'd exchanged, and they were just starting to move beyond the tedious small-talk stage. He skimmed through the message, growing increasingly impatient. Suzy favoured those little face icons. The whole page was littered with them – smiley faces, sad faces, surprised faces, embarrassed faces. Why couldn't she just use words like everyone else? She also put five or six exclamation marks after a sentence, or added extra vowels to words, so everything was sooooooooo much fun or soooooooooo boring. It wound Jason up when people couldn't write properly. He wasn't asking for brain of Britain, but he liked a woman to be able to write a sentence that started with a capital letter and ended with a full stop and at least made an attempt at the Queen's English. At least it wasn't in text speak. He refused to answer the messages that spelled thanks 'tnx'. Britain didn't go through two World Wars so that the English language could be mutilated beyond recognition. ~ Tammy Cohen

So why are you so mad at me for kissing you?"
"Because you took too long. If you'd done that, say, three years ago, we wouldn't have only had one kiss before we both get horribly mutilated. ~ Rusty Fischer

The friends of evangelical doctrine, and the advocates of orthodoxy, have the following objects to keep ever in view in this age; they must take care of their Bibles, that they be not mutilated or curtailed by lawless criticism; they must take care of their theology, that it be not perverted by false philosophy; and they must take care of their pulpits, that they be not occupied by heretical, unspiritual, or incompetent ministers. ~ John Angell James

…Having been, not only mutilated in our country, wounded in our very flesh, but also divested of our most beautiful images, for you gave the world a hateful and ridiculous version of them. The most painful thing to bear is seeing a mockery made of what one loves. ~ Albert Camus

How would you judge an artist who mutilated animals in a gallery because it was visually arresting? How riveting would the sound of a tortured animal need to be to make you want to hear it that badly? Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

It will be said that, although God's law is inscribed in our hearts, Scripture is nevertheless the Word of God, and it is no more permissible to say of Scripture that it is mutilated and contaminated than to say this of God's Word. In reply, I have to say that such objectors are carrying their piety too far, and are turning religion into superstition; indeed, instead of God's Word they are beginning to worship likenesses and images, that is, paper and ink. ~ Baruch Spinoza

The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast. ~ Joseph Conrad

Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified and mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny. ~ Michel Faber

I've been so mutilated by a lot of articles. I know I haven't said a lot of things I'm quoted as saying in the papers. ~ Mary Docter

Yes, I'm the one who washes the plates and glasses
They call me an easy woman
When they give me a penny
I still have to say thank you
Here I am, in ragged clothes
At the bottom of this shabby hotel
Today, you don't know who I am
Today, you don't know who I am

But one evening, one beautiful evening
A big commotion
People running along the shore
Saying: "Look who's coming!"
And me, I'll smile for the first time
They'll say: "You, you're smiling now?"

A big ship
A hundred cannons at the portholes
Will enter the harbour!

I'll always be washing
The glasses and plates
I'll always be an "easy woman"
When they give me a penny
I'll always say thank you
I'll keep my ragged clothes
At the bottom of this shabby hotel
And tomorrow, tomorrow like today
You'll never know who I am!

But one evening, that beautiful evening for which I live
Look how the cannons
Wake up and turn
For the first time, I'll burst out laughing
"What, brat, you have the heart to laugh?"

That big ship
A hundred cannons at the portholes
Will bombard the harbour!

Then the sailors will come to shore
More than a hundred, they'll mark with a cross of blood
Every house, every door
And it's before me that will be brought
Enchained, imploring, mutilated and bloodied
Your kind, all your kind, fi ~ Bertolt Brecht

In the absence of any therapy, the mentally ill of the 20th century were chained, shackled, straitjacketed, kept nude, electrocuted, half-frozen, parboiled, violently hosed, wrapped in wet canvas, confined to "mummy bags", subjected to insulin-induced hypoglycemic comas, forced into seizures with massive doses of the stimulant Metrazol, injected with camphor, drugged into three-week comas with barbiturates and tranquilizers, involuntarily sterilized, and surgically mutilated. Rape by hospital staff was common, as was humiliation and verbal abuse. One reporter noted that a state hospital patient had been restrained for so long that his skin was beginning to grow around the leather straps. ~ Antonella Gambotto-Burke

Autumn comes
like a buyer of cloth,
her long fingers
touching,
turning orange,
yellow, brown.

taking what she wants,
stretching
the bone taut air.

Her skin crackles beneath
our feet.

I didn't think anyone wanted me,

bruises pulled
like a sweater around
my neck.

We talk
in the pore tightening air,
branches bare,
about the girl buried in the chill
of prewinter.

We show each other
our mutilated children
in the guise of women
as autumn plucks
at our lips.

Each color,
blue, black, ochre
popping like kisses
on the rib lined flesh,
the puberty soft things.

And we muse
how women
keep bruises
hidden
beneath dead
leaves. ~ Janice Mirikitani

There were stories in the newspapers, of course, corpses in ditches or the woods, bludgeoned to death or mutilated, interfered with, as they used to say, but they were about other women, and the men who did such things were other men. None of them were the men we knew. ~ Margaret Atwood

The girl, who was thirteen, had been found mutilated and frozen into the muddy earth. This had ~ Stephen King

It is easy to understand that in the dreary middle ages the Aristotelian logic would be very acceptable to the controversial spirit of the schoolmen, which, in the absence of all real knowledge, spent its energy upon mere formulas and words, and that it would be eagerly adopted even in its mutilated Arabian form, and presently established as the centre of all knowledge. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

An aversion came over me that we feel for all the mutilated. Why is that so, do you think? Because they put us in mind of what we would rather forget: how easily, at the stroke of a sword or a knife, wholeness and beauty are forever undone? Perhaps. But toward you I felt a deeper revulsion. I could not put out of mind the softness of the tongue, its softness and wetness, and the fact that it does not live in the light; also how helpless it is before the knife, once the barrier of teeth has been passed. The tongue is like the heart, in that way, is it not? ~ J.M. Coetzee

Our characteristic response to the mutilated statue, the bronze dug up from the earth, is revealing. It is not that we prefer time-worn bas-reliefs, or rusted statuettes as such, nor is it the vestiges of death that grip us in them, but those of life. Mutilation is the scar left by the struggle with Time, and a reminder of it - Time which is as much a part of ancient works of art as the material they are made of, and thrusts up through the fissures, from a dark underworld, where all is at once chaos and determinism. ~ Andre Malraux

It is a thought as sweet as heaven to know that in the minds of each of us the may by the fence still blooms in an eternal springtime; that the snowdrop has in our hearts a triple birth, and blooms in three separate minds, faultlessly ... So that if all the flowers and grasses and hollows and hills of the old house were razed and mutilated - as they are now, I suppose - we keep them intact in three minds, each depending on the other to supply it with the delicate minutiae of remembrance. ~ Eve Langley

Historians of the future will find it incredible that we mutilated babies by cutting off the end of their penises in the name of medicine. There are now serious concerns this routine procedure may actually deprive adult men of a vital part of their sexual sensitivity. ~ Dean Edell

No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

When depreciated, mutilated, or debased coinage (or currency) is in concurrent circulation with money of high value in terms of precious metals, the good money automatically disappears. ~ Thomas Gresham

You see her as you see anyone in this world: distorted, warped, reflected, refracted, contorted, mutilated by time. ~ Catherynne M. Valente

Thank God he woke up. His face was too beautiful to be mutilated. ~ Alessandra Torre

We do it because we care. We care that Vincent Van Gogh mutilated his ear. We care that behind a pile of manure in the yard he destroyed his life. We care that Scott Joplin's music lives! We care because we know this: the life we save is our own. ~ Alice Walker

The Horror of the world was that thousands of evils fell upon innocent people, and no one was punished and with great promise there was nothing but pain and desire Children mutilated to form a choir of seraphim. Their song was a cry to heaven the sky was not listening. ~ Anne Rice

Jones wasn't completely crazy. The dismaying thing about the classic totalitarian mind is that any given gear, though mutilated, will have at its circumference unbroken sequences of teeth that are immaculately maintained, that are exquisitely machined. Hence the cuckoo clock in Hell - keeping perfect time for eight minutes and thirty-three seconds, jumping ahead fourteen minutes, keeping perfect time for six seconds, jumping ahead two seconds, keeping perfect time for two hours and one second, then jumping ahead a year. The missing teeth, of course, are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases. The willful filing off of gear teeth, the willful doing without certain obvious pieces of information - ~ Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Lyric:
"The keywords you have entered are 'I' and 'damaged', question mark.
" Do you want to ask, Am I damaged?
"Do you want to ask, Have I damaged?
'Damaged', adjective: defaced mutilated, mangled, impaired, injured, disfigured. Latin damnum, meaning loss or hurt. ~ A.F. Sanchez

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow. ~ Mervyn Peake

The whole faculties of man must be exerted in order to call forth noble energies; and he who is not earnestly sincere lives in but half his being, self-mutilated, self-paralyzed. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

And this is the main difference between the gospel and philosophy: for though the philosophers speak excellently and with great judgment on the subject of morals, yet whatever excellency shines forth in their precepts, it is, as it were, a beautiful superstructure without a foundation; for by omitting principles, they offer a mutilated doctrine, like a body without a head. ~ John Calvin

I've rewritten other films and watched my writing be mutilated, but luckily, it's been mutilated anonymously. ~ Christopher McQuarrie

Every one of course represents the spirit of his age, but there is an eternal aspect of the Spirit of every age which may be caught. To recreate the past from the mutilated fragments of the present is the task of the Historian. ~ Oscar Wilde

Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it. ~ Emma Goldman

Twelve years ago, when I was 10, I played at being a soldier. I walked up the brook behind our house in Bronxville to a junglelike, overgrown field and dug trenches down to water level with my friends. Then, pretending that we were doughboys in France, we assaulted one another with clods of clay and long, dry reeds. We went to the village hall and studied the rust rifles and machine guns that the Legion post had brought home from the First World War and imagined ourselves using them to fight Germans.
But we never seriously thought that we would ever have to do it. The stories we heard later; the Depression veterans with their apple stands on sleety New York street corners; the horrible photographs of dead bodies and mutilated survivors; "Johnny Got His Gun" and the shrill college cries of the Veterans of Future Wars drove the small-boy craving for war so far from our minds that when it finally happened, it seemed absolutely unbelievable. If someone had told a small boy hurling mud balls that he would be throwing hand grenades twelve years later, he would probably have been laughed at. I have always been glad that I could not look into the future. ~ David Kenyon Webster