‘Once and for all, stop eavesdropping on strangers talking about you in this crowded and filthy global toilet known as social media.’
— Naomi Klein, Doppelganger

‘In many cases, desire lies like a bodily boundary between the everyday and the unspeakable.’
— Samuel Delany, Shorter Views

‘It was as if daylight must never suspect the night habits of people.’
— Leo Madigan, Jackarandy

‘When describing invasive and in many cases painful experiments on animals, I have followed the convention of a detached style of writing ­because it seemed that to do otherwise would cause an unnecessary distraction. This is not a reflection of my actual feelings, but I feel that it deserves some apology, to whom I know not.’
— Mazviita Chirimuuta, The Brain Abstracted

Snakes the writhings of which were just a little inadequately wild, a little too like letters, as if they wrote you messages, but more quickly than you could read.

‘One may argue that virtually all literature, secular or biblical, is implicitly exegetical, a reworking of and comment on the prior texts that have shaped the writers’ mental universe.’
— Herbert Marks, ‘Introduction to Chronicles’, The English Bible, King James Version: The Old Testament: A Norton Critical Edition

‘But sometimes I think a story, even if it’s made up, can say things that are true. In my opinion, that’s what sets the best horror stories apart from the worst: they achieve a true form of fear.’
— Mónica Ojeda, Jawbone (translated by Sarah Booker)

‘What is that which gleams through me and smites my heart without wounding it? I am both a-shudder and aglow. A-shudder, in so far as I am unlike it, aglow in so far as I am like it.’
— St. Augustine

‘I was interested in this quality that a work of literature could have, that it could be so exciting and at the same time slightly incomprehensible.’
— Kenneth Koch, ‘Biographical Essay’

‘[O]ur motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests in a religious or a political form.’
— Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Ruge’, 1843