Haruki Murakami: Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.

As we go through life we gradually discover who we are, but the more we discover, the more we lose ourselves.

Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.

Ned Beauman: Glow

An anonymous email address, a pill capsule, a padlocked warehouse door, a joyful look in a girl’s eyes – you just have to push blindly through to the space behind them and hope there’s no void there to trap you.

... as if your soul needs to throw up or your stomach has realised that life is meaningless.

Christopher Kul-Want and Piero: Continental Philosophy: A Graphic Guide

Claiming that there are no longer social classes, only a single planetary petty bourgeousie in which all the old classes are dissolved, Agamben is dismayed at the level of nihilism to which this class has sunk, particularly in its refusal of any recognisable social identity or authentic discourse by which it might claim power.

"That which constituted the truth and falsity of the peoples and generations that have followed one anothe ron the earth - differences of language, of dialect, of character, of custom, and even the physical particularities of each person - has lost any meaning for the petty bourgeoisie and any capacity for expression and communication." - Agambon

Jeff VanderMeer: Annihilation

You can either waste time worrying about a death that might not come or concentrate on what’s left to you.

The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

Silence creates its own violence.

The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.

Yoko Ono: Grapefruit

A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.

Mirror becomes a razor when it's broken. A stick becomes a flute when it's loved.

Imagine the clouds dripping
Dig a hole in your garden to
put them in.

Give death announcements each time you move instead of giving announcements of the change of address. Send the same when you die.

Zia Haider Rahman: In The Light Of What We Know

Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God, a spreading limitless room within me. Who can reach its uttermost depth? Yet it is a faculty of my soul and belongs to my nature. In fact I cannot grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself: but where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside itself and not within? How can it not contain itself? As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost stupor. Here are men going afar to marvel at the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the long courses of great rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the movement of the stars, yet leaving themselves unnoticed. —Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X, 'Memory'

Which is about making our lives stand for something that our intelligence can grasp, saving us from confronting what we fear might be true – or what we would fear might be true – or what we would fear if we gave ourselves the chance – namely, that we’re accidental pieces of flesh, mutton without meaning.


Maps, contour maps and all maps, intrigue us for the metaphors that they are: tools to give us a sense of something whose truth is far richer but without which we would perceive nothing and never find our bearings.