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“[On Virginia Woolf] Craving to be set free from her egomania by something or someone stronger and altogether dissimilar from herself, she speculated endlessly upon the unknown: and for her the unknown was frequently the commonplace.”
― Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey and the Bloomsbury group: his work, their influence

“It was the summer in America when the nausea returned, when the joking didn't stop, when the speculation and the theorizing and the hyperbole didn't stop, when the moral obligation to explain to one's children about adult life was abrogated in favor of maintaining in them every illusion about adult life, when the smallness of people was simply crushing, when some kind of demon had been unleashed in the nation and, on both sides, people wondered "Why are we so crazy?" when men and women alike, upon awakening in the morning, discovered that during the night, in a state of sleep that transported them beyond envy or loathing, they had dreamed of the brazenness of Bill Clinton. I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE.”
― Philip Roth, The Human Stain

“— Square go then smart cunt!”
― Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting

“Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem