Joshua

“that most embarrassing of statistical fictions, the commercial reader (not you, of course; not me), who presumably consumes texts only for story, is assumed to stand deaf to style, and is thought to applaud only the endlessly repeated pornographies of action and passion that, for all their violences, still manage to pander to an astonishingly untroubled acceptance of the personal and political status quo.”
― Samuel R. Delany, Tales of Nevèrÿon

“she thought that sometimes you walk right into language as though it’s a chair out of place in a dark room: a word, an expression you live with all your life can become suddenly, completely unfamiliar. That night Beatrice stumbled over death, but it was dark, and she was tired, and she believed that she had stumbled across love.”
― Dale Peck, The Law of Enclosures

“He looked into the hole, and like any hole it said, Jump.”
― Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover: A Romance

“Love and war,” he said, “are Earth’s two staple commodities. We’ve been turning them both out in bumper crops since the beginning of time.”
― Robert Sheckley, Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley