Alex Merrett

“When you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look them in the face when they do this to me. And as i do so I always think: that's what a human is.”
― Sayaka Murata, コンビニ人間 [Konbini ningen]

“Cigarettes are the punctuation marks of life. Now I live without punctuation, without rhythm. My life is a stupid avant-garde poem.

I live without cigarettes to mark a question. Without cigarettes that end as we get happily or dangerously close to an answer. Or to the absence of one. Exclamation cigarettes. Ellipsis cigarettes. I would like to smoke with the elegance of a semicolon.”
― Alejandro Zambra, My Documents

“He visited Robert Schumann's grave to lay a wreath and he became so indebted by the purchase of a piano that he could not afford the journey home to his mother and sister at Christmas. Observing that his money always ran out fast, 'probably because it was so round', he sent in his place a volume of eight of his musical compositions...”
― Sue Prideaux, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche

“Intact families sat in the blue wash of television light, tranquil, like drowned statues.”
― R.O. Kwon, The Incendiaries