Sisyphus

“He had killed the Bowman Peter Williams, and years later had been tricked into eating his shrivelled head, which seated its longing deep in his marrow and its waking in the empty ventricles of the monster’s leather soul. Now it was waking up.”
― Brian Catling, The Cloven

“A new root had grown and in its winding search it had gripped a part of life that she had never experienced before. Her love for the child was overwhelming and gave her a new depth of purpose; the world now grasped her in a more substantial fashion. Held fast to its shifting and the rolling lurch of its futures.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile

“We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike BEFORE that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“His death had been the intruder that day and it had taken the only thing he really valued. It has pissed on his hopes and marked its territory inside his life. He hoped it would come back through the slit and take him now, struggle with him while he hacked at its merciless velocity.”
― Brian Catling, The Erstwhile