Andy Weston

“I love this room, said Moctezuma, you can't imagine how I miss being a priest. Where there were splotches of blood, he saw sprays of flowers. The withered fingers of the hands of great warriors sacrificed during the year's festivals swayed pleasingly like the branches of a small tree to the beat of some music he couldn't place, though in a possible future we would have recognized it. It was T. Rex's "Monolith."
The priest was also up to his ears in whatever he had taken to carry out his temple duties, so he bent his magic powers of hearing to the music and caught the sexy crooning of Marc Bolan.
He smiled. That's good stuff, he said.
Moctezuma swung his hips to the beat.
It's nothing I've ever heard before, he replied, but I like it. He pulled his elbows in tight and shimmied, moving his head gravely from side to side, transfixed by pleasure. The priest, swaying his own ass to the beat—he was nearly eighty, but on mushrooms he was a jaguar-said, I was thinking about you, believe it or not; look at this.”
― Álvaro Enrigue, You Dreamed of Empires

“On the map the southern part of the Peloponnese looks like a misshapen tooth fresh torn from its gum with three peninsulas jutting southwards in jagged and carious roots. The central prong is formed by the Tayegtus mountains, which from their northern foothills in the heart of the Morea to their storm-beaten southern point, Cape Matapan, are roughly a hundred miles long. About half their length - seventy five miles on their western and forty five on their eastern flank and measuring fifty miles across - projects tapering into the sea. This is the Mani.
As the Taygetus range towers to eight thousand feet at the centre , subsiding to north and south in chasm after chasm, these distances as the crow flies can with equanimity be trebled and quadrupled and sometimes, when reckoning overland, multiplied tenfold.
Just as the inland Taygetus divides the Messenian from the Laconian plain, its continuation, the sea-washed Mani, divides the Aegean from the Ionian, and its wild cape, the ancient Taenarus and the entrance to Hades, is the southernmost point of Greece.
Nothing but the bleak Mediterranean, sinking below to enormous depths, lies between this spike of rock and the African sands and from this point the huge wall of the Taygetus, whose highest peaks bar the bare and waterless inferno of rock.

The Taygetus rolls in peak after peak to its southernmost tip, a huge pale grey bulk with nothing to interrupt its monotony.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

“Paint over Mickey Mouse 

Burn Where the Wild Things Are

Pulverise the lego 

Set fire to the Christmas tree star.

Seize all the teddies 

Bury every skipping rope

Paint the walls dark brown 

Abolish all hope.”
― Michael Rosen

“The Cadillac was vast, domed, vaulted and trussed, specially built by Detroit to the Gospel Singer's own specifications, but costing as much as Detroit cared to make it cost, expense being no consideration with the Gospel Singer because he consistently made more money during any given year than he was able to spend. The interior was deep savage red: the seats and headliner formed in heavy leather; the floor padded in spongy carpet. A pale mauve light-indirect, as though emanating from the passengers themselves-lit up the Gospel Singer in the back seat where he lolled, long-jointed and beautiful under his incredible head of yellow girl's hair, and lit up Didymus-manager, chauffeur and confessor to the Gospel Singer-where he sat, narrow-faced and nicotine-stained, rigid in his dark blue businessman's suit. He turned to look over his shoulder at the Gospel Singer, his mouth like the blade of a hatchet. He wore a clerical collar.”
― Harry Crews, The Gospel Singer