Daniel Carey

It was an extraordinary sensation, but he was used to it. It was as though a shutter had rolled down on his brain, and clicked tight. It was as though the sound-track in a talkie had broken down and the still-proceeding picture on the screen had an utterly different character, mysterious, silent, indescribably eerie.

It was as though he had dived into a swimming-bath and hit his head on the bottom, and was floating about, bewildered and inaudible to himself, in hushed green depths.

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Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square

"When I couldn’t get to the roof I could hide under my parents’ bed, and though there was nothing to see I felt the same thrill, the same sense of privileged access to the underpinnings of things, to the currents of feeling on which all human existence delicately rests.."

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Nicole Krauss, Great House

"After various past allegiances, I have come to believe that Karl Marx was rightest of all when he recommended continual doubt and self-criticism."

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Christopher Hitchens

"To become completely lost is perhaps a rather rare experience for most people in the modern city. We are supported by the presence of others and by special way-finding devices: maps, street markers, route signs, bus placards. But let the mishap of disorientation once occur, and the sense of anxiety and even terror that accompanies it tweaks to us how closely it is linked to our sense of balance and well-being."

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Kevin Lynch

"After tidying up, Adela would plunge the rooms into semidarkness by drawing down the linen blinds. All colours immediately fell an octave lower, the room filled with shadows, as if it had sunk to the bottom of the sea and the light was reflected in mirrors of green water - and the heat of the day began to breathe on the blinds as they stirred slightly in their daydreams"

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The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz

"Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan “press on” has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race"

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Calvin Coolidge

"We all fear at some point that “our” world and “the” world are hopelessly estranged. Psychosis is the fulfillment of that fear."

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Michael Greenberg

"Every design, in essence, is a criticism of the context for which it has been produced."

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Max Bruinsma

"Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that."

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Herman Melville, Moby Dick

"Only he who completely surrenders himself to the game is granted all the ecstasies of heaven, all the doubts of hell. The half-hearted, the lukewarm, are here - as everywhere - cast aside."

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Hans Fallada, Wolf Among Wolves

"I spoke to no one, and no one spoke to me. I thought nothing, I felt nothing. I often had the sense that I had become part of the stone bench."

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The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami