…sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meaning for ourselves…

And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk

You don’t believe the sky is falling until a chunk of it falls on you.

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood

…he had answered “nothing”, that word we answer when we are thinking “everything”.

On Heroes and Tombs, Ernesto Sabato

In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson

Making a killing on Wall Street might be a harmless turn of phrase, but it only enjoys traction because of the culture it takes place in.


Irvine Welsh’s intro to American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Wasn’t history an event that repeated unforgettably in the mind?

Love in the New Millennium, Can Xue