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A Question of Geography
John Berger & Nella Bielski
‘If I'm not transferred to the mines, I'll hold out, and you must go on thinking of me as dead: you will be closer, my heart, to the reality.’
Coming down from the Mountains
Reinaldo Arenas
‘There is nothing to be heard now; just, in the darkness, the racket of the victrolas in Loma Colorada barrio, and the organ lording it over all the other noises.’
Jane Somers’s Diaries
Doris Lessing
‘I had never thought that before, never felt life in that way, as I did then; washing Maudie Fowler, a fierce angry old woman.’
A Wedding
Anita Brookner
‘The bride and groom were there all the time, in the centre, as they should be. A good-looking couple. But lifeless, figures from stock.’
The Time Sickness
Martin Amis
‘Before me through the restraining bars, the sunset sprawls in its polluted pomp, full of genies, cloaked ghosts, crimson demons of the middle sky.’
A Conversation with the Head of Orpheus
Russell Hoban
‘Far, far away in the night are live human beings whose breathing can be heard as they speak, and they're looking at their illuminated dials as I look at mine at this end of the darkness that curves with the night miles to the heave and swell of the ocean dawn.’
The Cabin
Raymond Carver
‘Yell defiance until his chest hurt, at the hawks that circled and circled over the meadow.’
Danner, 1965
Jayne Anne Phillips
‘She was sliding down on the seat under him and it was like the soundtrack at the drive-in – a surface closed over her.’
Soul and Body
Milan Kundera
‘What was screaming in fact was the naive idealism of her love trying to banish all contradictions, banish the duality of the body and soul, banish perhaps even time.’
Human Moments in World War III
Don DeLillo
‘Happiness is not a fact of this experience, at least not to the extent that one is bold enough to speak of it.’
