Jack Quincy Karaszewski

“best it spoils the present, with longing or dismay, and at the worst, well. Who really wants to find out how tight the sling is, for your own very personal ass, who wants to know how deep the shit will really be? Not you. Not me either. Because it’s rarely bliss saved up, is it, when you finally get there. I’ll take my now, waking with a lover’s scent still on me, around me, take my hopes before they’re maybe tragedy; a good morning is still a good morning, even if it leads to apocalypse at night.”
― Kathe Koja, The Cipher

“I’m going to work awhile,” Austen said, still careful to see nothing, reaching for his sketches, realizing with sudden puzzlement that there were more of them than he recalled completing, there were many, many sketches, he sifted faster and more roughly, first the sphinxes and then men with the hindquarters and genitals of dogs, women with alligator heads, children plucking tunes on the bones of their mothers with the spines of dead fish in their hair, and then things both wilder and less definable, things that resisted all possible categorization, things that might have come from places where the elements are blood and acid, where fire is air and air is a trustless medium to be molded or shrunk or banished by whim; he had no memory of any of these creatures, none of them with their small tilted eyes and smiling chops, none.”
― Kathe Koja, Bad Brains

“She was an abstraction in an abstraction: an impossible intersection of dozens of bright panes, as if the disassembled tiles of a stained-glass window had each been set aglow and animated. She swirled before me like a school of fish. Her world echoed her body: lights and angles and three-dimensional Escher impossibilities, piled like bright thunderheads. And yet, somehow I would have recognized her anywhere.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight