White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings Quotes

“The suicide hour of cold coffee and alien voices on the radio.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“All kinds of weird stuff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You've got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don't get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your head's in a bucket of ice. Time drips like a stalactite. The water for the coffee boils away in a tree of steam.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“Men of the cloth live in this monologue, it is their due: nobody talks back to a pulpit.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“Mossy had trouble breathing. He was not convinced the rewards repaid the effort. He took breath in, but after that let it fend for itself.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account - the presences that they created, or "figures" if you prefer it, like Rabbi Loew's Golem, became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of that fiction. They got out into the stream of time, the ether; they escaped into the labyrinth. They achieved an independent existence.
The writers were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they were able to propose a text that was prophetic.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

“MIDSUMMER: the shortest night. The year on its side. Joblard is to marry. To make that act, that avowal: St Bartholomew-the-Great. The Chemical Wedding, sponsus and sponsa, merging in song, twisting around the columns of that stone forest; celebrated here in the blending of russian stout, nigredo, with dry blackthorn cider. The risks crowd us, cackle; magpies at the window.”
― Iain Sinclair, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings