Jamie Monopoli

“People don't love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that's all. Later on, when you're old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That's all it is.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Vasco lived in Mangrove Heights, on a bluff overlooking the river. The first time Jed saw the house, he couldn't help thinking of the Empire of Junk. Towers jostled with gables, beams with columns. Gargoyles leered from the eaves, tongues sharp as the heads of arrows, eyes like shelled eggs. The front garden had been planted with all kinds of trees, so the house seemed to skulk. The path to the front door crackled with dead leaves. He could smell plaster, the inside of birds' nests, river sewage.

'I should have been born in a place like this,' Jed said, but Vasco was opening the door and didn't hear.”
― Rupert Thomson, The Five Gates of Hell

“اننا لهب صغير ومرتجف مهدد في كل لحظة بالخمود ونحن نعرف الخوف وقبل أي شئ يسكننا الخوف”
― José Saramago, Seeing

“you've got to face facts and the fact is life is a joke, a fucking bad joke, or, no, a bad fucking joke.”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis