‘The weeping spider is called Phoebe, he is a boy spider and he lives on the moon. The rest you will have to find out yourself.’

— Catherine Besterman, The Extraordinary Education of Johnny Longfoot

Does it count if you push the bees to hive within a skull? It doesn’t count, & the honey that you get is nothing.

‘Nature is a haunted house  — but Art — a house that tries to be haunted.’

— Emily Dickinson.

‘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’

‘British liberalism’s sweet, sweet combo of the snide and the intellectually vapid. A refusal to think outside of a news-moment, an inability to read images as texts, an abject contempt for deep thinking, a suffocating “rationality” and incuriosity at its heart.’

— Dan Hancox

‘Late modernity is, after all, a remarkably shrill and glaring reality, a dazzling chaos of the beguilingly trivial and terrifyingly atrocious, a world of ubiquitous mass media and constant interruption, a ceaseless storm of artificial sensations and appetites, an interminable spectacle whose only unifying theme is the imperative to acquire and spend.’

— David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God.

Beyond the city there must be a rubbish heap of diseased stones.

‘When will this hellish patience come to an end?’

— Kuchlavok’s letter to comrades, August 1917