Tolkien InMySleep

“I was born in the city of Bombay on August 15th 1947. No, that will not do. The time is important. It was at the stroke of midnight, the precise instant of India's arrival at independence. I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotface, Baldy and Too Pleased With My Own Brilliance, had my destiny tied to my country's. Now my time is running out, and I have so many stories - too many you may think - to tell, to save myself from crumbling into dust. But I am the Arabian Knights and you must put up with it.

The story starts in 1915. My grandfather, Aadam Aziz, fell on a tussock while praying and lost his faith. Blood fell from his not inconsiderable nose and solidified into rubies and diamonds, and I could already feel the Booker Prize in my hands.”
― John Crace, Brideshead Abbreviated: The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century

“I met Murder on the way -
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him”
― Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy: Written on Occasion of the Massacre at Manchester

“Stephen felt himself overtaken by a climactic surge of feeling. It frightened him because he thought it would have some physical issue, in spasm or bleeding or death. Then he saw that what he felt was not an assault but a passionate affinity. It was for the rough field running down to the trees and for the path going back into the village where he could see the tower of the church: these and the forgiving distance of the sky were not separate, but part of one creation, and he too, still by any sane judgement a young man, by the repeated tiny pulsing of his blood, was one with them. He looked up and saw the sky as it would be trailed with stars under darkness, the crawling nebulae and smudged lights of infinite distance: these were not different worlds, it seemed now clear to him, but bound through the mind of creation to the shredded white clouds, the unbreathed air of May, to the soil that lay beneath the damp grass at his feet. He held tightly on to the gate and laid his head on his arms, in some residual fear that the force of binding love he felt would sweep him from the earth. He wanted to stretch out his arms and enfold in them the fields, the sky, the elms with their sounding birds; he wanted to hold them with the unending forgiveness of a father to his prodigal, errant but beloved son. Isabelle and the cruel dead of the war; his lost mother, his friend Weir: nothing was immoral or beyond redemption, all could be brought together, understood in the long perspective of forgiveness. As he clung to the wood, he wanted also to be forgiven for all he had done; he longed for the unity of the world's creation to melt his sins and anger, because his soul was joined to it. His body shook with the passion of the love that had found him, from which he had been exiled in the blood and the flesh of long killing.”
― Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong

“Still cool out by the cabin when I reached it, early-morning sunlight skipping bright coins across the lake.”
― James Sallis, Cripple Creek