‘The more I struggled to be plain, the more / Mannerism hobbled me.’
— James Merrill, The Book of Ephraim

‘To the west, high against the sky, rose the towers of the city, their summits blurred by the helicoptrous cloud.’
— William Sansom, ‘In the Maze’

‘He’d atoned for sins he hadn’t committed in the name of a God he didn’t like, and he couldn’t understand why the experience gave him peace.’
— Bari Wood, The Tribe

‘According to Bion, in addition to the conflict between love and hate, there is a crucial clash in the mind between knowledge or the desire to understand, and the aversion to knowing and understanding.’
— Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two

‘True philosophy does not dismiss ambiguities and aporias as meaningless or nonsensical, but instead recognizes them as moments of possible awakening from unexamined prejudices, and explores them in as many modalities and with as much subtlety as possible.’
David Bentley Hart, ‘A Bark Without a Bite’

‘ Genre fans – accept that works of art are works of art and not anthropological documents about a real place that just happens to not exist: Challenge difficulty – Impossible.’
— James Holloway

‘[I]s there a named creature that makes pictures askew?’
— Michelle Farran

‘If you get a bargain it doesn’t argue back with you. It just, sort of, sits there and is nice to you.’
— Shirley Neale

‘The God of the underworld, Pluto, is Isodaitēs, the divider into equal portions.’
— Richard Seaford, Money and the Ancient Greek Mind

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