Katie Steele

“At his age, everything about that season had seemed mysterious to her, holding its breath, quivering on the edge of change. Whatever point of the year you viewed it from, you could already see Christmas as a place of promise, an enchanted island rising from nowhere in the winter dark, illuminated by tiny lights in rich deep blues and reds, the very opposite of the climate on that forgotten coast. She had watched the same happen to Phillip, then, after a year or two, pass.”
― M. John Harrison, The End of Everything

“When you talk about your parents, you aren’t really talking about people. You’re talking about some force or organising principle in your life. Everything has contributed to it, including acts of unrelated human beings, and even of your own, which had nothing to do with them. You call that whole complex ‘your parents’, because it originated with them. Any fresh input gets mixed up with them, fusing into a substrate from which you emerge different but the same.”
― M. John Harrison, The End of Everything

“USE OF THIS TERM WAS as problematic as the crisis itself. People often described the City of London as ‘the bad patch’, the most noticeable, most permanent evidence that things had gone wrong. But they would also describe a change in their local reality as a bad patch as if it were a basically economic fluctuation, reducing the value of their houses or the social capital concentrated on their bookshelves or in the art on their walls. ‘The country’s going through a bad patch,’ they might say. Or: ‘We’re coming out of a bad patch in our lives.’ Using the phrase in its older, pre-crisis sense – the way you might talk about a failed marriage or career – was perhaps an unconscious attempt to normalise the inexplicable and minimise the disaster.”
― M. John Harrison, The End of Everything

“No one could bring themselves to dig up the grimy old fascism word from the twentieth century and paste it on to the twenty-first century, or to say things like ‘never again’ or to exclaim, in regard to officials and armies who participate in ethnic cleansing, ‘I just don’t understand how humans can obey those sorts of orders.’ No one wanted to dig it all up,”
― Deborah Levy, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein