Dry Ice Factory

'Mr Fawnshope, having written some thirty lines of his tragedy the previous day, with which he was not dissatisfied, was in a complaisant humor, neither chasing an elusive epithet, nor brooding over an infelicitous line. He said everything that was proper, and, when all enquiries into the invalid's condition were exhausted, conversed on various topics so much like a sensible man that Mr Rivenhall found himself quite in charity with him, and was only driven from the room by Lady Ombersley's request to the poet to read aloud to her his lyric on Annabel's deliverance from danger. Even this abominable affectation could not wholly dissipate the kindlier feelings with which he regarded Mr Fawnthorpe, whose continued visits to the house gave him a better opinion of the poet than was at all deserved. Cecilia could have told him that Mr Fawnthorpe's intrepidity sprang more from a sublime unconsciousness of the risk of infection than from any deliberate heroism, but since she was not in the habit of discussing her lover with her brother he continued in a happy state of ignorance, himself too practical a man to comprehend the density of the veil in which a poet could wrap himself.' (Georgette Heyer, The Grand Sophy)

'“I need to be forlorn and anonymous in order to be truly happy.' (Diane Arbus)

'Although [Sade] documented his sexual fantasies with an unequalled diligence, and these fantasies delight in the grisliest tortures (even if, in the context of his fictions, he creates an inverted ethical superstructure to legitimise these cruelties) his own sexual practice in life remains relatively obscure. From the evidence of the two court cases in which he was involved, the affair of Rose Keller in 1768 and the charges made against him by a group of Marseilles prostitutes in 1772, he seems to have enjoyed both giving and receiving whippings; voyeurism; anal intercourse, both active and passive; and the presence of an audience at these activities. These are not particularly unusual sexual preferences, though they are more common as fantasies, and are always very expensive if purchased. When they take place in private, the law usually ignores them even when they are against the law, just as it turns a blind eye to wife beating and recreational bondage. Sade, however, seems to have been incapable of keeping his vices private, as if he was aware of their exemplary nature and, perhaps, since the notion of sin, of transgression, was essential to his idea of pleasure, which is always intellectual, never sensual, he may have needed to invoke the punishment of which he consciously denied the validity before he could feel the act itself had been accomplished.' (Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman, 1978)

“It was so heavy it kept listing to the left, I swear they had to nail that thing to my head! It was gorgeous Max Factor hair. It cost a lot of money and somebody stole it. I still have visions of that damn wig turning up. I go down to Skid Row for my recovery program – I’m clean and sober now – and I keep expecting to find some bag lady or drag queen wearing it!” (Grace Lee Whitney quoted on file770.com. RIP, yeoman.)

'One of the people at the table was the elder who had spoken to me, the day we'd arrived. Who'd changed the choice of song, when she'd seen that we were in mourning. "Good evening, Grandfather," I said to her, and bowed. Because of my long familiarity with Valskaay, I was fairly sure my choice of gender -- required by the language I was speaking -- was correct.

'She looked at me for ten seconds, and then took a drink of her beer.'

--Ann Leckie, Ancillary Sword

'The delight of recollection refers not only to the one who has loved but also to the one who has loved letters, rekindling knowledge and sensation that are both literary and erotic. In fact, the two activities are not unrelated: readers will recall subjective individual associations connected with their education into both love and letters. Still further, recognition of this highly conventional system implies more than a "tension between physis [nature] and tekhne [art] that is reflected in the very artificial form in which 'natural' education of the children is described." Rather, the boldness of Longus' experiment suggests that at a certain level of analysis, love and letters are inseparable, that one's only means for apprehending any experience of eros is already entirely shaped and determined by the cultural system of representations, including and especially stories about love. Thus, as the children speak the language that the narrator writes, and live in the spatial landscape he creates, the whole problematic relationship between nature and art comes alive. For if, by the premises of the novel, the children are doing what comes naturally, then when they engage in such pastoral activities as comparing one another to berries or myrtles, pelting the other with apples, wishing to be the pan pipe so that the other might play upon the beloved, imitating the nightingale in their singing, or feeling the first pangs of love in the springtime of the flowers, then a curious set of contradictory processes is set into seesaw motion in the mind of the reader, one now gaining, now losing the ascendancy: are these conventions rooted in nature, or (quite the reverse) is "nature" in our perceptions of it sheerly convention?' (Froma I. Zeitlin, "The Poetics of Eros: Nature, Art, and Imitation in Longus' Daphnis and Chloe)

'What do you want a girl for, mate, when you got a pipe and dreams?' (Confessions of an Opium Eater, 1962)

'If my father married for sorrow, then he married the right woman. Sorrow followed my mother like a lover. Her father died in his boat of a fever, his body absorbed into the river to find its way to the sea alone, to rot, to be devoured by the squids. Her brother died of a snake bite, blackening, his leg growing swollen and so pestilential in odor that he could not be kept in the house. He slept in a boat until he died, singing the songs of death and trying over and over to pluck the moon from the sky. And her sister. Her sister was last seen walking at the base of the hills. One of her sandals came to shore two days later. Her basket was found, too, her lunch still wrapped in banana leaves, but no one knew whether she had fallen or jumped.

'One could reason about it. There was plenty of sorrow in Kiem, particularly among us, the hotun, the low. There was not a family who had not suffered some disaster, an accident with sharks, an attack from the pirates who lived in the caves. A fall, an encounter with crocodiles, a wound that refused to heal. Rape, madness, river blindness, kyitna. One could say that my mother was not unusual among these people, all of whom were lacerated with misfortunes.'

--Sofia Samatar, A Stranger in Olondria

'I couldn’t believe my good fortune when I got to work so early in my career with one of my idols, Richard Matheson, on TZ-The Movie. I’d been reading him since my teens and ranked him with Bradbury, Sheckley, Beaumont et al –and here I was making my first studio movie and trading ideas with the guy who wrote The Shrinking Man! Richard was as terrific a person as he was a writer, and luckily for the rest of us he was very prolific. So I think I’ll go and revisit his Dell paperback collection SHOCK, which features a number of his greatest short stories.' (Joe Dante on Dave Kehr's blog)

'It was difficult to tell where dust-starred hill ended and star-dusted sky began.' (Mary Gentle, Golden Witchbreed)