‘This endless faith in rims, edges, cutting points and the loyalty of objects.’
Aase Berg, ‘On the Edge Between Discs of How Things Really Work’

You were told not to go into the basement of the sanatorium, and this is why. You are not supposed to see these great beasts chained up like this, looking at you so sad, energies being siphoned from them.

‘We went to the bathing pool. Someone had recently dived and the board was still quivering.’
Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths

‘Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you say anything?’
— Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun

‘Hatred fought hatred recognising Absolute Evil to be Absolute’
— Etel Adnan, The Arab Apocalypse

‘Contradictions don’t mean you ain’t telling the truth.’
— Gayl Jones, Mosquito

‘Such is the true genius of folk conservatism; it always serves at the behest of masters, and yet it chooses to see itself as the last bulwark against power.’
— Tad DeLay, Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want?

‘I don’t think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.’
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God

‘You think justice is a kindly commodity? No, it razes, it throws down, it cuts swathes.’
— Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell

‘ [T]he bizarre death drive of the Republican party was somehow there in his [Lindsey Graham’s] big, blue eyes, in that vacant stare that evoked both the deer in the headlights and the headlights themselves.’
— Elizabeth Schambelan, ‘Eclipse of the Sun’