‘it’s hard not to think everything’s right with the world when you see sunlight glinting through leaves, but it might not be true, of course, the fact that things could go wrong and the sun might still glint’

— Lucy Ellman, Ducks, Newburyport

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