Tom Johnson

“Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally "profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour.”
― M. John Harrison, Viriconium Nights

“Manufacture dooms in your head and you will go mad. Reality is incontravertible. Also, it will not be anticipated.”
― M. John Harrison, The Pastel City

“At Birkin Grif's left, his seat insecure on a scruffy packhorse, Theomeris Glyn, his only armour a steel-stressed leather cap, grumbled at the cold and the earliness of the hour, and cursed the flint hearts of city girls. ”
― M. John Harrison, The Pastel City

“He ran toward the light. When he passed the corpse of his dead friend, he began to weep again. He picked up his sword. He tried to smash a crystal window with its hilt. The corridor oppressed him. Beyond the windows, the dead brains drifted. He ran on.
'You should have done it,'whispered Birkin Grif in the soft spaces of his skull; and, 'OUROBUNDOS!'giggled the insane door, as he fell through it and in to the desert wind. His cloak cracking and whipping about him, so that he resembled a crow with broken wings, he stumbled toward the black air-boat. His mind mocked him. His face was wet.
He threw himself into the command-bridge. Green light swam about him, and the dead Northmen stared blindly at him as he turned on the power. He did not choose a direction, it chose him. Under full acceleration, he fled out into the empty sky.”
― M. John Harrison, The Pastel City