That revulsion-compulsion at the sight of a cigarette half-smoked then dropped to bob in a toilet bowl. You know how it would feel, wet between your lips.

‘Any messiah who comes is false. The essence of the messiah is that he will always be coming.’

— Yeshayahu Leibowitz.

‘If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble.’

— Claire Messud.

Cade, you motherless lamb.

‘I cannot inhabit the mindset of a primitive form of the species: a creature with concepts for stone or tree, but not for arguing that non-existents may have properties but still be non-existent, such as the specifications for a devil.’

— Laura Del-Rivo, ‘Notes on Time’

‘…the inexhaustible energies of despair…’

— Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History.

‘[O]ne day, I too would die and … I would prop myself up and remain upright, looking straight ahead until the last, and, when death triumphed over my gaze, I would be like a proud monument raised with hatred in the face of silence’.

— Jacqueline Harman, The Mistress of Silence

‘Why do all the English poems end with a little laugh?’

— Franco Fortini

‘[T]he notion that one day the red dawn will indeed break over Clapham is the one thing that keeps me going.’

— Angela Carter.