"Greg Adkins"

“There is a city surrounded by water with watery alleys that do for streets and roads and silted up back ways that only the rats can cross. Miss your way, which is easy to do, and you may find yourself staring at a hundred eyes guarding a filthy palace of sacks and bones. Find your way, which is easy to do, and you may meet an old woman in a doorway. She will tell your fortune, depending on your face. This is the city of mazes.”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

“Exterminators refer to old rats as Moby Dicks. “Rats that survive to the age of four are the wisest and the most cynical beasts on earth,” one exterminator says. “A trap means nothing to them, no matter how skillfully set. They just kick it around until it snaps; then they eat the bait. And they can detect poisoned bait a yard off. I believe some of them can read. If you get a few Moby Dicks in your house, there are just two things you can do: you can wait for them to die, or you can burn your house down and start all over again.”
― David Brendel, An Editor’s Burial: Journals and Journalism from the New Yorker and Other Magazines

“Her doctoral dissertation was to have been on the “saturation hypothesis,” a theory of her own devising which held that every word in a work of literature, far from having one or two most likely meanings, meant everything that any reader could make of it, and that each supposed meaning was of equal value to all others. This theory, she said, dovetailed with other current literary theories that gave more power to critics and less to writers, who tended to write with finite intentions.”
― J. Robert Lennon, Pieces for the Left Hand: Stories

“They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? By forgetting. We cannot keep in mind too many things. There is only the present and nothing to remember”
― Jeanette Winterson, The Passion