Kevin Tole

“If physical strength was letting her down, her capacity for cruelty would never fail her. At her most loving, Mother had never been able to resist the cruel thrust. To have loved her in her prime of beauty, as many had, was like loving or ‘admiring’ rather, a jewelled scabbard in which a sword was hidden: which would clatter out under the influence of some peculiar frenzy, to slash off your ears, the fingers, the tongues, or worse, impale the hearts of those who worshipped. And yet we continued to offer ourselves, if reluctantly.”
― Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm by Patrick White

“Books as defendants under arrest, against the wall. With their backs to the people. In a line, squeezed tight, unable to move, in mute silence. They were the lucky ones. Days, months, years will go by, and the arrested books will gradually disappear. Book by book, the dismantling of the library, what’s not burnt in the Palace of Justice. And the same thing will happen to the man’s entire credentials. Everything will be the object of pillaging.”
― Manuel Rivas, Books Burn Badly

“And with it all is that fleeting sense of mortality, that lifetime is a short span of importance to the individual and unimportant in the grans scheme of continued existence.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob

“His friends all referred to him as ‘Bill’. Most of his life he had spent trying to disguise himself as one of the costive, crutch-heavy males who came to discuss wool and meat: so slow and ponderous, like rams dragging their sex through a stand of lucerne. There were also the would-be cuddly fe-males making up to ‘Bill’, unaware how immaculate he was.”
― Patrick White, The Eye of the Storm