Quotes From "Terrorscape" By Nenia Campbell

Fuck your manners."" You don't have to settle for just my manners. Nenia Campbell

Hatred is about possession. It is all-consuming, cruel, and vainglorious. When love is allowed to fester, it becomes twisted and corrupt; it settles deep in the heart...and metastasizes, sending its dark roots through the body to raze all that stands in its way. Love is chaste and pure. Love is banal.... No, hatred has infinitely more possibilities. Nenia Campbell

Did you think I'd only want you once? Oh, my, you are more naïve than I thought. Why would I go through so much trouble for a mere tryst? Does a man ride a stallion but one time before condemning it to the abattoir? Nenia Campbell

Death is one lover who cannot be spurned. Nenia Campbell

Now she knew living was just a brief hiatus, a blip really, in the infinite line of nothingness that composed that shadowy realm of the unknown. It could stop at any time. Nenia Campbell

It wasn't that she was sad–sadness had very little to do with it, really, considering that most of the time, she felt close to nothing at all. Feeling required nerves, connections, sensory input. The only thing she felt was numb. And tired. Yes, she very frequently felt tired. Nenia Campbell

Once upon a time, there was a naïve and innocent girl who thought she could tame the beast and live happily ever after. But the beast did not want to be tamed, for he was a beast and beasts care not for such things, and the girl died along with her dreams. From childhood's grave sprang a young woman, jaded before her years, who knew that beasts could wear the skins of men, and that evil could exist in sunlight, as well as darkness. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. . Nenia Campbell

Words were the bane of her existence. She drowned in them when all she wanted was silence, only to have them recede when one desperately-sought phrase would be the key to her salvation. Most things were like that: excess in times of abundance, and shortages in times of dearth. Life, she realized, was an unbalanced scale, and would never weigh in one's favor, struggle as one might. Nenia Campbell

When we mated I felt your heart stop beating and it was as if the world had stopped turning. It was only while surrounded by death that I realized I had never felt more alive. Nenia Campbell

Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her. Nenia Campbell

We're all hunters in my family, you know. Deer, ducks…damsels. Nenia Campbell

Ask yourself what a man without guile might do to your body in the dark. Nenia Campbell

Don't tell me it's going to fucking be okay! I am not okay with being that fucker's pinata! Nenia Campbell

Understanding did not provide solace or make the pain go away; in many ways, understanding was just more salt in the emotional wound. Ignorance allowed one to fight back with unfettered cruelty. Understanding inspired empathy, which led to guilt, as well as suffering. She looked at Gavin, supine, unconcerned, contented, and thought that perhaps there was something to being a sociopath. If you didn't have a heart, it couldn't be broken. Nenia Campbell

That's how it started: a series of small hurts and excuses between two people that built up slowly, widening over time to form a vast and yawning divide. Nenia Campbell

He acted like a libertine of Europe with a genteel Southern propriety–and had all the morals of an emotionless psychopath. The two former masked the latter, like leaves covering a snare. You didn't notice the steel jaws until they were impaled in your flesh, and by then it was already far too late to run. Nenia Campbell