J. M. Ledgard quotes:

But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.

jinn . . . occupy bodies which are in a liminal state . . . when consciousness is a sheet of copper beaten down, mirroring only the moment

Our souls are made of water, Goethe says. So too, our bodies. There is a flow within us, rising and falling, unidirectional, to the heart. there is a flow without also. We circulate. We are drawn up, and we fall back down to earth again. It's all haemodynamics.

If man had a sense of proportion, he would die of shame.

If literary fiction is reduced to only middle-class families dealing only with middle-class angst, then it's really finished as a force for grappling with the world.