Wounds Quotes

“And then Carlos thought, You left me. You left me in the end. Why? He hugged his dog close, burying his nose in her fur. He knew there was no answer beyond the obvious, constant imbalance in any transaction of the heart. You don’t love me the way I love you.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“He had a theory that people warped as they aged, like old records left out in the sun, and unless you did it together and warped in conformity to each other, you eventually became incapable of aligning with anybody else.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“He tells us that occasionally there are men and women who wander through Hell in thin processions, wearing heavy gray robes and bearing lanterns to light their way. They are invariably chained together and led through the burning canyons by a loping demon: some malformed, tooth-spangled pinwheel of limbs and claws. They tour safely because they are shuttered against the sights and sounds of Hell by the iron boxes around their heads, which give them the appearance of strange astronauts on a pilgrimage through fire.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“He wished to be home in London, with its dark libraries and lantern-lit alleys, with his pipe and his brandy, surrounded by the Society’s flickering candles and devil-haunted shadows. There he would feel safe. Out here, in this briny, sun-wracked environment, he felt exposed and bewildered. A moth lost in a delirium of light.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“And yet, they caught glimpses of things on the shore that could have had no other provenance. A pinwheel of arms and hands, connecting in a knot of tissue bearing one staring blue eye, kept pace with them for hours, leaping in what appeared to be play, sometimes disappearing behind rocks for a mile or more, only to be spotted again as the landscape evened out; a small shack at the base of the cliff, with three charred black figures, paused in their construction of a wooden pyre to fix them with a red glare as they sailed past, while something small and frightened bucked beneath the”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“They were surrounded by threat, by coiled violence, and by the possibility of extravagant fortune. He felt as though he rode on the crest of a towering wave. He felt like a usurper, like a new and terrible king.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“Carlos had never married; he'd become so acclimated to his loneliness that eventually the very idea of human companionship just made him antsy and tired. It was not as though he'd had to fight for his independence; his demeanor had grown cold and mean as he aged, not from any ill feeling toward other people, but simply from an unwillingness to endure their eccentricities. He had a theory that people warped as they aged, like old records left out in the sun, and unless you did it together and warped in conformity to each other, you eventually became incapable of aligning with anybody else.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“Dangling over the edge of the near cliff, so large he mistook them for earthen formations, were the enormous upturned fingers of a left hand. Now that he saw them he could not fathom how he had missed them before: alabaster and smooth as stone, they might have been mistaken for a statue were it not for the damage they had taken: a pink wound, like an incision, along the meat of the thumb, from which some dark-rooted trees seemed to have sprung; and the snapped digits of the first and second fingers, the latter broken so thoroughly that splintered bone—a dingy yellow in comparison with the pale flesh—jutted into the air like cracked wood. The hand seemed luminescent against the dark flow of clouds overhead. Martin found himself short of breath. He lowered his head, closed his eyes, and concentrated on the work of his lungs. “What is it?” said Gully, cowed with awe. Alice said, “I daresay it is an angel’s corpse, Mr. Gully.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell

“Kısa süre sonra kızı arabaya apar topar bindirdi ve şoförün kamçıyı şaklatmasıyla kız, ardında sıradan bir köşe ve sıradan bir sokak bırakarak gözden kayboldu.”
― Nathan Ballingrud, Wounds: Six Stories from the Border of Hell