‘Such is the true genius of folk conservatism; it always serves at the behest of masters, and yet it chooses to see itself as the last bulwark against power.’
— Tad DeLay, Against: What Does the White Evangelical Want?

‘I don’t think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.’
— Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God

‘You think justice is a kindly commodity? No, it razes, it throws down, it cuts swathes.’
— Doris Lessing, Briefing for a Descent into Hell

‘ [T]he bizarre death drive of the Republican party was somehow there in his [Lindsey Graham’s] big, blue eyes, in that vacant stare that evoked both the deer in the headlights and the headlights themselves.’
— Elizabeth Schambelan, ‘Eclipse of the Sun’

‘Certain thinkers are so original in their purpose that the critical question is not so much whether the reader stands in accord with the thinking, but whether she or he has genuinely encountered, absorbed, and been transformed by the intellectual and existential challenge that the thinking incites. One need not be wholly convinced or converted to receive the untold benefit of the thinking proposed.’
— Lissa McCullough, ‘Introduction to D.G. Leahy’

A puddle moving across the floor when it was not watched.

‘[O]ne of those half-crazed savants who gets in your head, who you can’t stop thinking about’.
Natalie Wynn, ‘The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling’

‘The basic problem is that if God exists, what is the point of literature? And if He doesn’t exist, what is the point of literature?’
Eugène Ionesco

‘[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