‘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’

‘This endless faith in rims, edges, cutting points and the loyalty of objects.’
Aase Berg, ‘On the Edge Between Discs of How Things Really Work’

You were told not to go into the basement of the sanatorium, and this is why. You are not supposed to see these great beasts chained up like this, looking at you so sad, energies being siphoned from them.

‘We went to the bathing pool. Someone had recently dived and the board was still quivering.’
Barbara Comyns, Our Spoons Came From Woolworths