Lauren Beukes

Visibility limits your imagination of the ocean only as far as you can see, ten metres, fifteen at a stretch. But it's only in the utter black that you can feel the true scale, the volume and weight of that gaping unknowable drift between continents.

Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting

You can map out a whole city according to the weight of memory, like pins on the homicide board tracking the killer's movements. But the connections get thicker and denser and more complicated all the time.

(_) everything is finite. Life. Love. All this.' (_) 'Sadness too. Although that's harder to let go of than happiness.

He always thought a muse should be sex on legs.

Only other people can make you feel real.

The dream knows what they are waiting for, even if they don__ themselves.The end of everything.The moment when it reveals its miracle boy and all the eyes will look and their seeing will be horror and glory and wonder and it will pierce the skin of the world, collapse dimensions, and open the doors and the work will breathe and dance in his shoes and the dream will be able to escape.

This is my idea of family, actually, a sticky morass you can't chew your way out of.

Explosions and fighting robots and shit. What__ that got to do with the heart?

Time heals. Crushes let up. Splinters work their way out. Doesn't mean they don't leave scars that itch.

It's why you need other fingers, other tongues. Only other people can make you feel real.

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.

You have to get up pretty early in the morning to invent the news.

She laughs, and that's really all he wanted.

Next time, can you ask him to bring cookies? I don't like to put up with that level of insane unless there's some kind of high-calorie compensation.

They burned this neighbourhood down in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of bubonic plague, and it occurs to me that they should consider doing it again, to purge the blight of well-meaning hipsters desperately trying to paint it rainbow

Dope don't have no sympathy, not for love or family, definitely not for fear. Put dope and the devil up against each other in the ring, and dope will win out. Every single time.

So are you an inmate or a rubbernecker?" she asks."Rubbernecker," I answer without hesitation. "You?""I'm a screw. Or on staff, anyway. Used to be an inmate. Repeat offender. Crimes against my body. Puking sickness followed by heroin, which led to more puking sickness." I'd be surprised at her forthrightness, but that's addicts for you. The twelve steps crack 'em open and then they can't shut up.