Lauren Beukes

“Only other people can make you feel real.”

“Florrie smiles with unmoderated joy, because she can't see that most people bank their happiness like it's something you might run out of”

“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.”

“He always thought a muse should be sex on legs.”

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

“The original stories are mined out, and all that’s left is fool’s gold.”

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

“you're deluding yourself that you have some deep spiritual connection, like you didn't just read it on Wikipedia. There's a difference between tradition and culture.”

“The dream knows what they are waiting for, even if they don’t 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.”

“Explosions and fighting robots and shit. What’s that got to do with the heart?”

“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.”

“She's even been practicing making out with the back of her hand. Which was about as effective as tickling yourself. It's why you needed other fingers, other tongues. Only other people can make you feel real.”