‘[T]he importance of having to identify with a character in a book is vastly overrated’
Brian Evenson, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love

‘When I remember things it’s not just some kind of mathematical machine in my head. It is contaminated in terms of facts. It’s mixed with desires, with fears. Memory is such a fickle thing.’
– Erla Bolladottir, Out of Thin Air

‘So this was hatred. It was great hatred, the great Seventies hatred.’
– Anna Burns, Milkman

‘Everything affects and is affected by every other thing’.

— Engels, ‘The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man’.

‘Pink is not a colour, it is the bastard of triumphant red and guilty light; born of incest where hell and heaven have played their parts, it has remained the colour of shame.’

— Jean Ray, ‘La Terreur Rose’

‘It happened that before you arrived here, all the dreams had been dreamed, and you had entered a dreamless territory.’

— Can Xue, ‘An Episode with no Foundation’.