From Michael Bracewell‘s Unfinished Business (2023), page 2.

“I sound like an asshole in French. To be fair, everyone sounds like an asshole in French.”
– James Greer, Bad Eminence, 2022
“He wanted to remember what it was like to be potential.”
– Lavinia Greenlaw, An Irresponsible Age, 2006
“The coherence of Jacob the glimpsed stranger broke down and she saw in his image what she had never seen in his presence: his struggle to become and remain his idea of himself.”
– Lavinia Greenlaw, An Irresponsible Age, 2006
“So much of life felt like bidding a tearful goodbye to someone then realising you were both walking the same way anyway.”
– Luke Kennard, The Answer to Everything (2021)
“If the world cannot be made beautiful, it can at least be destroyed.”
– Len Gutkin, Dandyism: Forming Fiction from Modernism to the Present (2020)
“I’d mispronounce ‘gnocchi’ and she’d avoid saying it all evening so as not to embarrass me. I would meet her eye and think: in this way I could strip you of every word you know. I’d take them like truffles and you’d say, ‘Help yourself,’ and then I’d take those too and you’d be speechless.”
– Naoise Dolan, Exciting Times (2020)
“J’ai perdu le dernier lien avec le monde dont je suis issue.”
– Annie Ernaux, Une femme (1987)
“I didn’t want the after, or even the during: I wanted the before.”
– Claire-Louise Bennett, “I Am Love,” Gorse 2 (2014)
“[O]ne travels to the Grand Canyon, Niagara Falls, the Taj Mahal in order to be transported, in order to experience an intensity of being there that is a kind of transport, a departure from oneself.”
– Steven Connor, Dream Machines, 2017