Iain Banks
Iain Banks

The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the gray-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and

screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass?
Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.

James Berardinelli
James Berardinelli

When a movie is this bad, it's hard to adequately describe its awfulness in words. The temptation exists to write something along the lines of: "Something this horrible has to be seen to be believed." Of course, that kind of advice would lead to e-mail death threats and other assorted nasty comments from those who spend money on The Devil's Rejects. … Aside from its poor production values,

horrendous acting, and ignoble morality, The Devil's Rejects isn't engaging cinema. Even if the simple act of sitting in a movie theater watching people get hacked up for 90 minutes doesn't bother you, the dullness and repetition is likely to.

Godfrey Bloom
Godfrey Bloom

You can torture people to death but you jolly well can't give them a full life sentence because that's against their human rights. We can't hang them because we're now a member of the European Union and it's embedded in the treaty of Rome. It's a personal thing but I'd hang the bastards myself. Especially for some of these, especially for the guy who hacked the soldier to death. I do hope they

would ask me to throw the rope over the beam because I'd be delighted to do so.

Nick Cave
Nick Cave

Pilgrim gets 1 hacked daughter,
And all we get are 40 hack reporters,
Uptown 100 skirts are bleeding,
And Mr. Evangilist says She's hit, ev'ry little bit.

Glen Cook
Glen Cook

Those soldiers hacked and slashed. Their faces were distorted with the horror of their actions but they were out of control, far past the point where they could stop. The flicker of firelight made everything seem more hellish and surreal.
I had seen this before. I had seen my own brothers this way, a few times, back in the north. The blood smell takes control and kills the mind and deadens the

soul and there is nothing human left.

Samuel R. Delany
Samuel R. Delany

Nevertheless, I still wonder. Each of us, with money, gets further and further away from those moments where the hand pulls the beet root from the soil, shakes the fish from the net into the basket—not to mention the way it separates us from one another, so that when enough money comes between people, they lie apart like parts of a chicken hacked up for stewing.