connections between the humane, the monstrous, and the divine:
1. “Wanna make a monster? Take the parts of yourself that make you uncomfortable–your weaknesses, bad thoughts, vanities, and hungers–and pretend they’re across the room. It’s too ugly to be human. It’s too ugly to be you. Children are afraid of the dark because they have nothing real to work with. Adults are afraid of themselves.” (richard siken, from editor’s pages: black telephone)
2. “Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?” (clarice lispector, the hour of the star)
3. “This beast, this angel is both you and I.” (adrienne rich, from the complete poems: this beast, this angel)
4. “Frankenstein not only gives form to the dialetic of monstrosity itself and raises questions about the pleasures and dangers of textual production, it also demands a rethinking of the entire Gothic genre in terms of who rather than what is the object of terror. By focusing upon the body as the locus of fear, Shelley’s novel suggests that it is people (or at least bodies) who terrify people, not ghosts or gods, devils or monks, windswept castles or labyrinthine monasteries.” (j. halberstam, skin shows: gothic horror and the technology of monsters)
5. “Monsters exist because they are part of the divine plan, and in the horrible features of those same monsters the power of the creator is revealed.” (umberto eco, the name of the rose)
6. “But girls contain multitudes. We are made up of so many odd parts. The reason that the monster in Frankenstein is so memorable is that, when it opens its mouth, out comes the voice of an alienated teenage girl.” (heather o’neill, portrait of the artist as a young corpse)
7. “God should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men.” (elisabeth hewer, wishing for birds)
8. “I think the devil doesn’t exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness.” (fyodor dostoevsky, the brothers karamazov)
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