Euan

“One has serious reason to doubt one is as sane as one had hoped.”
― John Gardner

“I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they denied it to all those who were not exactly like themselves, in all their unreason. If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all around me, then the six of us-mounts and riders both-could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opened the gates of Eden and let Eve and her familiars tumble out. Understand, then, that though I would not say I privately engaged in metaphysical speculation as we rode through the reedy approaches to the river, I certainly meditated on the nature of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand. That clockwork girl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her?”
― Angela Carter

“The city: grime, glamor, geometries of glass, steel, and concrete. Intractable, it rises from nature, like proud Babel, only to lie arthwart our will, astride our being. Or so it often seems. Yet immanent in that gritty structure is another: invisible, imaginary, made of dreams and desire, agent of all our transformations. It is that other city I want here to invoke…Immaterial, that city in-formed history from the start, molding human space and time ever since time and space molded them selves to the wagging tongue. IHAB HASSAN, Cities of Mind, Urban Words”
― Samuel R. Delany, Neveryóna: Or, the Tale of Signs and Cities

“The fact is that every writer *creates* his own precursors. His work modifies our perception of the past, as it will modify the future.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings