Paradise Rot Quotes

Her skin was soft, softer than I remembered, as if she was rotten too, a fallen Eve. Under us I could hear the apples rumble. Not a real sound, but a sort of internal buzzing, like how you can imagine hearing nails and hair growing or buds opening.

I suddenly knew nothing about myself, nothing seemed right in English, nothing was true.

But my dreams are full of apples, and in the dark my body slowly transforms into fruit: tonsils shrinking to seeds and lungs to cores.

The women feast on the poor man’s flesh, And chew each bone whilst it is fresh, So the two women can become one with a kiss.

I’ll finish your fairy tale. You forgot to mention the snake. In the story the apple poisons the snake, and Eve packs her books and moves out of paradise. The End.

I took a bite of a Bloody Ploughman. Even the flesh was red. 'Bloody,' Carral said. 'Nice colour,' I answered. 'It looks sinful. I bet that was the apple Eve ate, you know, in the Bible, the forbidden fruit.' 'Might be. But I've eaten some too now. Does that mean you have to kick me out of your house?' I held the half-eaten apple out to her. She burst out laughing and pointed out at the factory: 'Does this look like paradise or what?

The choice is ours to make whether the stars in the night sky shine upon us as headlights of an approaching paradise or as tail-lights of receding fortunes

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.

“I promised him something,” I answer softly. I don’t want to admit what he already knows. That there’s more going on between me and Morpheus than I ever let on. “A promise, huh? How romantic.” His words slash like knives. He’s become a master at wielding more than a brush since he’s been here. “So that’s why you’ve crashed our little paradise. To keep your promise to Morpheus.” I wince. “No. I came to rescue you both. You have every right not to believe me . . . to be mad at me. I know this has been hell. This place . . . it’s broken you.” “I was broken before that.” His tortured expression delivers the allegation— thanks to you and bug-rot —better than his voice ever could.

I'll tell you the fairy tale of the apple. Eve ate the apple, and then Adam came and did so too. Afterwards the apple was forgotten, and it was assumed that it rolled away in the grass while Adam and Eve were chased out of the garden. But that's not true, because secretly the apple rolled in between Eve's legs, scratched open her flesh and burrowed into her crotch. It stayed there with the white bite marks facing out, and after a while the fruit-flesh started to shrivel, and mould threads grew from the edges of the peel. The mould threads became pubic hair and the bite mark became the slit between the labia. Soon all of Eden followed the apple's example and started to decompose and rot, and since then this has happened in all gardens and everything in nature, and honey mushrooms came into existence, and rot and parasites and beetles arose. But the apple was first, and it never stops rotting, it just gets blacker. The apple has no end, just like this fairy tale.

I kept going to lectures, and every time I left, it felt like I crossed a threshold between dream and reality, sleep and wakefulness.

the locale. Their faces were pulled tight, more like masks than faces, really. They moved slowly,

Her face is white, covered in lime, algae skeletons, beer froth, and sea foam. I stroke her head, smooth and bare and shining: a glistening doorknob without a door.

The Inevitable Tide by Stewart Stafford The inevitable tide comes, To claim every one of us, Whether sufficient breath of life, Is inhaled deep or forsaken. Then let them bend and screech, Their hearsay and homilies, To rake the ashes of earthly remains, In our final resting place. The person no longer lingers, Gone to Paradise or Hell, Purgatory or mere rotting decay, A ghostly rose bled white on binding soil. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

The women feast on the poor man’s flesh, And chew each bone whilst it is fresh, So the two women can become one with a kiss; The dream of every biologist! To grow together is their pursuit, And his red flesh their forbidden fruit, He stumbles and gasps and finally dies; From his ashes will a four-breasted creature arise.

I cross the bathroom floor and open the door. I stay standing there for a while. Then I go outside. When I walk down the street, it’s a struggle, as if I have roots in the house that are stretched long behind me, and no matter how far I go, no matter how many corners I turn on the way to Franziska’s flat-share by the beach, they are stuck. They stretch, get thinner and thinner until they are as fine as thread Slowly but surely I imagine that the brewery crumbles and follows me, threading itself on my cord as though it’s a house built from small gleaming beads. The front door reaches me first, then the floor panels from the kitchen, the enamel from the bathtub and the steel covering from the taps, glass-splinters from the chandelier and the apple cores from the compost. And Carral follows too. She crumbles in the bathtub. Tooth by tooth, nail by nail, bone by bone. And new beads grow, threading themselves on my roots. The beads appear from her mouth and eyes, her crotch, hip socket and fingertips.

We remembered the delicate fig-shaped island,stranded between the American Empire and peaceful Canada, as it had been years ago, with its welcoming red white-and-blue flag-shaped flower bed,splashing fountains, European casino, and horse paths leading through woods where Indians had bent trees into giant bows. Now grass grew inpatches down to the littered beach where children fished with pop topstied to string. Paint flaked from once-bright gazebos. Drinking fountains rose from mud puddles laid with broken brick stepping stones. Along the road the granite face of the Civil War Hero had been spray-painted black. Mrs. Huntington Perry had donated her prize orchids to the Botanical Garden in the time before the riots, when civic money still ran high, but since her death ion the eroding tax base had forced cutbacks that had laid off one skilled gardener a year, so that plants that had survived transplantation from equatorial regions to bloom again in that false paradise now withered, weeds sprang up amid scrupulous identification tags, and fake sunlight flowed for only a few hours per day. The only thing that remained was the steam vapor, beading the sloping greenhouse windows and filling our nostrils with the moisture and aroma of a rotting world

I cross the bathroom floor and open the door. I stay standing there for a while. Then I go outside. When I walk down the street, it’s a struggle, as if I have roots in the house that are stretched long behind me, and no matter how far I go, no matter how many corners I turn on the way to Franziska’s flat-share by the beach, they are stuck. They stretch, get thinner and thinner until they are as fine as thread. Slowly but surely I imagine that the brewery crumbles and follows me, threading itself on my cord as though it’s a house built from small gleaming beads. The front door reaches me first, then the floor panels from the kitchen, the enamel from the bathtub and the steel covering from the taps, glass-splinters from the chandelier and the apple cores from the compost. And Carral follows too. She crumbles in the bathtub. Tooth by tooth, nail by nail, bone by bone. And new beads grow, threading themselves on my roots. The beads appear from her mouth and eyes, her crotch, hip socket and fingertips.

My bedroom is separated from the main body of my house so that I have to go outside and cross some pseudo-Japanese stepping stones in order to go to sleep at night. Often I get rained on a little bit on my way to bed. It’s a benediction. A good night kiss. Romantic? Absolutely. And nothing to be ashamed of. If reality is a matter of perspective, then the romantic view of the world is as valid as any other - and a great deal more rewarding. It makes of life and unpredictable adventure rather that a problematic equation. Rain is the natural element for romanticism. A dripping fir is a hundred times more sexy than a sunburnt palm tree, and more primal and contemplative, too. A steady, wind-driven rain composed music for the psyche. It not only nurtures and renews, it consecrates and sanctifies. It whispers in secret languages about the primordial essence of things. Obviously, then, the Pacific Northwest's customary climate is perfect for a writer. It's cozy and intimate. Reducing temptation (how can you possibly play on the beach or work in the yard?), it turns a person inward, connecting them with what Jung called "the bottom below the bottom," those areas of the deep unconscious into which every serious writer must spelunk. Directly above my writing desk there is a skylight. This is the window, rain-drummed and bough-brushed, through which my Muse arrives, bringing with her the rhythms and cadences of cloud and water, not to mention the latest catalog from Victoria's Secret and the twenty-three auxiliary verbs. Oddly enough, not every local author shares my proclivity for precipitation. Unaware of the poetry they're missing, many malign the mist as malevolently as they non-literary heliotropes do. They wring their damp mitts and fret about rot, cursing the prolonged spillage, claiming they're too dejected to write, that their feet itch (athlete's foot), the roof leaks, they can't stop coughing, and they feel as if they're slowly being digested by an oyster. Yet the next sunny day, though it may be weeks away, will trot out such a mountainous array of pagodas, vanilla sundaes, hero chins and god fingers; such a sunset palette of Jell-O, carrot oil, Vegas strip, and Kool-Aid; such a sea-vista display of broad waters, firred islands, whale spouts, and boat sails thicker than triangles in a geometry book, that any and all memories of dankness will fizz and implode in a blaze of bedazzled amnesia. "Paradise!" you'll hear them proclaim as they call United Van Lines to cancel their move to Arizona.

There is, however, one natural feature of this country, the interest and grandeur of which may be fully appreciated in a single walk: it is the ‘virgin forest’. Here no one who has any feeling of the magnificent and the sublime can be disappointed; the sombre shade, scarce illumined by a single direct ray even of the tropical sun, the enormous size and height of the trees, most of which rise like huge columns a hundred feet or more without throwing out a single branch, the strange buttresses around the base of some, the spiny or furrowed stems of others, the curious and even extraordinary creepers and climbers which wind around them, hanging in long festoons from branch to branch, sometimes curling and twisting on the ground like great serpents, then mounting to the very tops of the trees, thence throwing down roots and fibres which hang waving in the air, or twisting round each other form ropes and cables of every variety of size and often of the most perfect regularity. These, and many other novel features – the parasitic plants growing on the trunks and branches, the wonderful variety of the foliage, the strange fruits and seeds that lie rotting on the ground – taken altogether surpass description, and produce feelings in the beholder of admiration and awe. It is here, too, that the rarest birds, the most lovely insects, and the most interesting mammals and reptiles are to be found. Here lurk the jaguar and the boa-constrictor, and here amid the densest shade the bell-bird tolls his peal.

As I smelled, shifted, and stepped over the rotting dead, I came to understand something fundamental: I was alive, and I wanted to go on living. I did not want to be killed by Lord Nudd. I did not want to become yet another hideous, grinning, bloated lump of putrid flesh. I was not ready to die; I wanted to live.

Every evening she took a bite of an apple as she came home, and left it on the kitchen table or the bench. Sometimes I sat and watched the apple; how the juices dribbled from the bite marks. I wondered what was apple juice and what was her spit, and thought about licking the place where she’d bit to see if I could tell the difference.

I’d imagined that I could feel something growing in my belly, something that wouldn’t become a proper foetus, but something much worse: a blackened, dead, and rotten fruit.

Carral and Jo, two sets of lips sucking the same man in and out of each other’s mouths. Here lay two Siamese twins, bound together by a thick freckled masculine sinew. And when something pushes in between my labia I’m torn and I scream, blood trickles down my thigh like warm dark fruit juice. Whatever’s in there twists in all the way, crawls up to my black apple and bites, and that’s how we are bound together: Carral and Jo, Carral and Jo together: A black, dead and rotten fruit.

They whispered to me – Jo … Jo … Jo … Jo … – as if I was leaking into the room and dissolving, flowing from my own bloody crotch like black juice from a rotten apple core.

Her skin was soft, softer than I remembered, as if she was rotten too, a fallen Eve.

I hadn't met a lot of girls who talked while they peed, and definitely not a lot of girls who talked about peeing while they did it. There's usually a lull in the conversation even when you're sat in neighbouring cubicles. Maybe peeing and talking is a bit like singing and playing an instrument at the same time, I thought, two sets of muscles having to work side by side.

She tastes good, right?” Saint asks him. “Like fucking paradise? Remember that when you’re rotting in hell.

While I ran the bath, I sat down to read the book. The mushroom leant against my shoulder and read with me in silence.

I was sure I heard tiny ripples on the surface of the milk inside its carton.

I dreamt of two bodies, girls’ bodies, our bodies: our upper bodies had melted together and our necks twisted around each other, thin and long like swans’ necks.

The dogs scratched at our feet, hoping for a scrap of candy. “Think about it,” Roger went on. “Those blokes on the Dolphin? They were scurvy-racked, sex-mad, fed on biscuits full of weevils. Anyplace off that ship would have looked like paradise.” He tossed a dog half his chocolate bar. “Then came Bougainville and his ship full of Frogs. They’re sex-mad, too, only they write better than the Brits. So the myth takes off. Noble savages, New Cythera, the whole romantic rot. No mention of human sacrifice.” He fed the dog the rest of his chocolate. “Cook, he’s clear-eyed, but no one listens to a lowly Yorkshireman. So we get Gauguin, another French wanker, painting his fourteen-year-old crumpet. Fifty years later, Michener and the Yanks show up. Then come the travel hacks, who have to justify their fancy rooms and plane fare by telling us this shithole is paradise.