Weekend Words: Monster
"I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself."
The actor and writer Spalding Gray (1941-2004), best known for his monologues Swimming to Cambodia (1985) and Monster in a Box (1992), which were later turned into films, would have turned 75 today.
Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy!
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.
—William Shakespeare, Othello, Act 3, Scene 3
The Green-eyed Monster causes much woe, but the absence of this ugly serpent argues the presence of a corpse whose name is Eros.
-Minna Antrim
I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me. Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fancy to what is positively trivial.
—Charles Baudelaire
A pox on ’em, and all that would force nature.
Affectation is her greatest monster.
—William Wycherley, The Country Wife
Men heap together the mistakes of their lives and create a monster they call destiny.
—John Oliver Hobbes
The fanatic is incorruptible: if he kills for an idea, he can just as well get himself killed for one; in either case, tyrant or martyr, he is a monster.
—E. M. Cioran
Murderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.
—Alice Sebold
I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.
—Michel de Montaigne
The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.
—Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes
Rationalists are admirable beings, rationalism is a hideous monster when it claims for itself omnipotence.
—Mahatma Gandhi
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
—Adrienne Rich
America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.
—John Quincy Adams
The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere; their Hub, as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustles and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry. Baltimore is amusing for a week, but Philadelphia is dreadfully provincial; and though one can dine in New York one could not dwell there.
—Oscar Wilde
It is conventional to call monster any blending of dissonant elements. I call monster every original inexhaustible beauty.
—Alfred Jarry
