Cameron Brake

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love?”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“Narrative cannot sustain formlessness any more than light can sustain darkness - it is the antithesis of formlessness, and so it can never truly communicate it. Chaos is the one truth that narrative must always betray, for in the creation of its delicate structures that reveal many truths about life, the portion of truth that has to do with incoherence and disorder must be obscured. More and more, it had felt to me that in the things I wrote, the degree of artifice was greater than the degree of truth, that the cost of administering form to what was essentially formless was akin to the cost of breaking the spirit of an animal that is otherwise too dangerous to live with.”
― Nicole Krauss, Forest Dark

“Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“You took me on because I was helpful in your political cause. Because I could aid in your experiments. Beyond that I was of no use to you, and so you abandoned me.” I struggled to get my breath. “I was nothing to you. You never saw me as equal. You were more concerned that slavery should be a moral stain upon white men than by the actual damage it wreaks on black men.”
― Esi Edugyan, Washington Black