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

‘‘[T]he Fall could be upwards; knowledge delivered as revelation, significance like that of the muscular wind which hurled the red sand across continents. I look at nature, my fingers poke my mind, conscientiously checking, “Am I in ecstasy? Is this an epiphany? Can I learn to fall upwards?”’
— Laura Del-Rivo, ‘Notes on Time’

‘There’s an unexamined belief that combat veterans have, through their close encounter with violence, been witness to an unspeakable revelatory truths about existence. … It’s sheer nonsense, of course, in strictly objective terms, but it’s a powerful belief. As a veteran myself, I have enjoyed and profited from this kind of auratic power. I have also, for better or worse, spent several years trying to publicly dismantle it.’
— Roy Scranton, Los Angeles Review of Books, 4 November 2019

‘Nothing that I’d accomplished seemed of particular significance, since it had been accomplished by me’
— Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Gun Accident – An Investigation’

‘That’s why people become monks, because they get sick of being around doomed reality all the time’.
— Joy Williams, ‘The Last Generation’