Ian Onion

“According to the police, of course, our community was a rogue community. It was we who were the enemy, we who were the terrorists, the civilian terrorists, the associates of terrorists or simply individuals suspected of being but not yet discovered to be terrorists. That being the case, and understood by both parties to be the case, the only time you’d call the police in my area would be if you were going to shoot them, and naturally they would know this and so wouldn’t come.”
― Anna Burns, Milkman

“Their eyes searched silently for any sign of life, waiting for some flock of egrets to slingshot out from the bushes, waiting for a single mulletfish to brush the river’s crest, even hoping for a distant whiff of cow dung. Even shit has life in it, after all.”
― Kevin Jared Hosein, Hungry Ghosts

“The train slowed down at the approach to shrewsbury station and glided between the eleventh-century abbey and the stadium of shrewsbury town football club. Two sacred arenas where men chanted and waited for a miracle that never came.”
― Malcolm Pryce, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being In Aberystwyth

“I am a refugee, an asylum-seeker. These are not simple words, even if habit of hearing them makes them seem so.”
― Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea