‘The smack of the waves on the shoreline sounded like a sheet of glass breaking.’
— June-Alison Gibbons, The Pepsi-Cola Addict

‘I am only infallible if I speak infallibly but I shall never do that, so I am not infallible.’
— John XXIII

‘[T]he balance has tilted towards writers who really love doing homework – they see the novel as homework, something you get a good star on.’
— Joanne McNeil, ‘what joanne is reading’

‘Every generation selects a favoured character-type based on a value. We live in an age that, in valorising “personal agency”, lays across the individual’s shoulders one of the heaviest double-binds a culture can construct: glad I wasn’t born into it.’
— M John Harrison, Wish I Was Here

‘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