‘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’.

‘I do not know how best to makes sense of the vast conceptual gaps between the equally uninviting options of either just hailing the existence of a discourse, or only assessing its quantifiable effects. … An ideology is not reassuringly without “effects” simply because it isn’t wholeheartedly suscribed to.’

— Denise Riley, The War in the Nursery.