Dexter Wilkens

“He said he'd teach her the important things, starting with the most important thing of all, the correct way to make tea and rice, so tea wasn't overbrewed and the rice wasn't overcooked. He said: You want to make food forget Indian way. Indian's system is like American system, everything overdone. They have no subtle. He sent her to buy octopus. She brought the tentacles home in a bag of ice and cut them into thin slices, at a sharp angle. She put the sliced octopus in a saucepan with ginger and green onions and added a black bean paste. He told her to touch the octopus to the flame and serve. But she let the dish cook for a good five minutes until the flesh was tough and rubbery. You overdid, he told her. Old Chinese saying, you don't need take off your pant to fart.”
― Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

“The ceiling of languages is falling down. Either add to this rubble or shove at least some of it away.
Liberty, shit. The liberty to starve. The liberty to speak words to which no one listens. The liberty to get diseases no doctor treats or can cure. The liberty to live in conditions cockroaches wouldn't touch except to die in. The liberty to be an eighty-three-year-old Ukranian shuffling around in her slippers among the cat shit in the slum building hallway-'Is there a landlord here? Is there light anywhere?”
― Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

“I mean, nobody tells you sex is going to be so _noisy_, do they? ...”
― Iain Banks, The Crow Road

“But I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me.

All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I have never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us.”
― Denis Johnson, Jesus’ Son