Anna Seghers: Transit

Communist stuck in Marseilles with other refugees fleeing the Nazis.

“What can I expect here? You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don’t you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: ‘What do you think you’re waiting for? You’ve been in Hell for a long time already.”


When you're young and healthy you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different — it paralyzes you.

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited

Toffs face love and loss between the wars.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there's no room for the present at all.


I should like to bury something precious in every place where I've been happy and then, when I'm old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.


He wasn't a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole.

Jon McGregor: Reservoir 13

Time passes in Northern England small town following disappearance of a girl.

The nettles and cow parsley came up in swathes, the bindweed trumpeting through the hedges.


The only sounds were footsteps and dogs barking along the road and faintly a helicopter from the reservoirs.


In the first week they were seen setting off from the visitor centre with their father leading the way, returning an hour later in the sort of glowering silence that follows a difference of views.

Ali Smith: Winter

Second seasonal novel in a series examining responses to Brexit.

That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.


That's one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.


The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what’s happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.

Alasdair Gray: Lanark

Strange post-apocalyptic fiction on Glasgow, art, sex and death.

"You suffer from the oldest delusion in politics. You think you can change the world by talking to a leader. Leaders are the effects, not the causes of changes."


“People in Scotland have a queer idea of the arts. They think you can be an artist in your spare time, though nobody expects you to be a spare-time dustman, engineer, lawyer or brain surgeon.”


“But I do enjoy words—some words for their own sake! Words like river, and dawn, and daylight, and time. These words seem much richer than our experiences of the things they represent—”


He looked at them and saw their faces did not fit. The skin on the skulls crawled and twitched like half-solid paste. All the heads in his angle of vision seemed irregular lumps, like potatoes but without a potato’s repose: potatoes with crawling surfaces punctured by holes which opened and shut, holes blocked with coloured jelly or fringed with bone stumps, elastic holes through which air was sucked or squirted, holes secreting salt, wax, spittle and snot. He grasped a pencil in his trouser pocket, wishing it were a knife he could thrust through his cheek and use to carve his face down to the clean bone. But that was foolish. Nothing clean lay under the face. He thought of sectioned brains, palettes, eyeballs and ears seen in medical diagrams and butcher’s shops. He thought of elastic muscle, pulsing tubes, gland sacks full of lukewarm fluid, the layers of cellular and fibrous and granular tissues inside a head. What was felt as tastes, caresses, dreams and thoughts could be seen as a cleverly articulated mass of garbage.


“War is just a violent way of doing what half the people do calmly in peacetime: using the other half for food, heat, machinery and sexual pleasure. Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself, and the recipe is separation.”


“I distrust speech therapy. Words are the language of lies and evasions. Music cannot lie. Music talks to the heart.”


“JUST BECAUSE YOU'RE PARANOID DON'T THINK THEY AREN'T PLOTTING AGAINST YOU.”