Date: 2009

"All these years later he still carried with him, would carry for life, the image of her standing in mismatched underwear in the staffroom of Loco Caliente, illuminated by a shaft of afternoon sun like the light in a cathedral, as she yelled at him to get out and shut the bloody door."

— Nicholls, David (b. 1966)

Date: 2009

"Eliot closes his eyes and sorts through the database of biblical references that he jammed into his brain during his days as a somewhat-more-devout young man."

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2009

"Like some inoperable cancerous thing inside his brain, a new mental organ had awakened, insistently and without mercy pushing him forward, punishing him with guilt, compelling him to feel things and want things that can't be argued for or against on the basis of logical reasoning, analy...

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2009

"His daddy issues need to be resolved, his therapist says, and he could probably stand to improve his relationship with his mother too, but Eliot wonders whether any amount of analysis will ever unknot this tangled mass of mental rope."

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2009

"Whatever else has happened to him, the moral thing that erupted in his mind hasn't gone into remission. If anything, it has only metastasized, secretly colonizing, under the cover of this last month's madness, more and more of his sense of self."

— Konstantinou, Lee

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"And when what has kept me going for the whole of my adult life, the ambition to write something exceptional one day, is threatened in this way my one thought, which gnaws at me like a rat, is that I have to escape."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"As all the thoughts and images of consciousness began to move in directions over which I had no control, and I seemed to be lying there watching them, like a kind of lazy sheepdog of the mind, I knew sleep was around the corner."

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"Everything I saw, faces, bodies ambling through the cabin, stowing their baggage here, sitting down, stowing their baggage there, sitting down, was followed by a reflective shadow that could not desist from telling me that I was seeing this now while aware that I was seeing this, and so on ad ab...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"I switched off the computer, slid it into my bag, rinsed the cup and placed it in the sink, pulled out the loose electrical cable, turned off the light, and donned hat and coat in the moonlight filtering through the cracks in the blinds, all the time picturing her in my mind's eye in the large f...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

Date: 2009, trans. 2012

"I saw him in my mind's eye, when we went skiing together once, in Hove, gliding in and out of the trees, and in every clearing we could see the sea, gray and heavy and vast, and smell it too, the aroma of salt and seaweed that seemed to lie pressed up against the aroma of snow and spruce, Dad te...

— Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)