‘[O]ur motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests in a religious or a political form.’
— Karl Marx, ‘Letter to Ruge’, 1843

‘‘[T]he Fall could be upwards; knowledge delivered as revelation, significance like that of the muscular wind which hurled the red sand across continents. I look at nature, my fingers poke my mind, conscientiously checking, “Am I in ecstasy? Is this an epiphany? Can I learn to fall upwards?”’
— Laura Del-Rivo, ‘Notes on Time’

‘There’s an unexamined belief that combat veterans have, through their close encounter with violence, been witness to an unspeakable revelatory truths about existence. … It’s sheer nonsense, of course, in strictly objective terms, but it’s a powerful belief. As a veteran myself, I have enjoyed and profited from this kind of auratic power. I have also, for better or worse, spent several years trying to publicly dismantle it.’
— Roy Scranton, Los Angeles Review of Books, 4 November 2019

‘Nothing that I’d accomplished seemed of particular significance, since it had been accomplished by me’
— Joyce Carol Oates, ‘Gun Accident – An Investigation’

‘That’s why people become monks, because they get sick of being around doomed reality all the time’.
— Joy Williams, ‘The Last Generation’

‘Mathematical models are, after all, bricolage constructions inscribed with curdled utopias, with arms and with rights – so many scraps of social history.’
— Alice Bamford and Donald MacKenzie, ‘Counterperformativity’, New Left Review 113

‘The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings.’
— Heraclitus

‘I could see the sky through the coils.‘
Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

‘I like the cranes, they’ve got a kind look. You look out of your window and look up at the sky and there they are, all yellow and orange like some great big giraffe or something, moving about up there, and all the red and yellow clay down below and the grey huts and the men with their red helmets and the yellow patches on their coats and the broken bits of houses they’re knocking down over the other side … I tell you, it’s a real picture in a funny sort of way, specially on a fine morning. And at night, with the light shining out on the cranes up there in the sky, like angels’ wings, I say to myself – angels’ wings.’
Celia Dale, A Personal Call and Other Stories

‘In the world of nonentity, metaphor too has lost its rights!’
Franz Mehring, ‘Karl Marx and Metaphor’