Quotes from Matthew De Abaitua

I'm not afraid of anything and I will not fight.

Humans make tools. Some animals make tools too. The making and using of tools is important for developing language, how we think and speak. If we do not make anything, it affects our thinking.

Horror is the awakening of repressed knowledge, something that you have known all along but kept at the periphery of awareness so that life can go on.

Exhaustion is a thin blanket tattered with bullet holes.

His father's love, once presumed to be fathomless, actually had disturbing creatures scuttling around at the bottom of it: disappointment, anger, frustration.

The soul dies like a star – by collapsing in on itself.

Kindness is not entered onto the great ledger of civilisation.

A talent for forgetting is necessary to maintain civility.

It is in his obsessions that mankind most closely resembles his machines.

Her self lagged behind her anger, like a mother picking up after a destructive child.

Surfaces are important," he said. "Don't make the mistake of thinking that answers can only be found in the depths of things. In their guts. Sometimes, what you are looking for is right there, written all over the face.

Take risks, succeed because of those risks:

He was smoking his joint now, and it was having no effect upon him.

I want you to know, Ruth, that it was impossible to survive our time without doing wrong. It was an evil age. If we had lived in a better time, then we would have been better people.

I'm not afraid of anything and I will not fight.

Before he began destroying the stock, he was aware of no intention to do it. The only correlative to the impulse that he could think of – and this was a thought that occurred to him mid-act, as he hefted a three litre jar of psychofuel above his head, the top of his skull lifted off, holes drilled in his spine, anger playing him like a flute – was when he was a recidivist in his addictions, and would find himself honking up the grokk without really wanting it.

There is nothing permanent about being a writer.

When I hear people fondly recalling their past, I hear Death sharpening his knives.

Patricia listened, deliberate and self-contained. Under the subtle terms of the meta-meeting, the pursing of her white lips was almost ostentatious. She placed her attention upon him in the same way that she might place her hand on the head of a small dog. She can't be trusted. No, of course she couldn't. But isn't that thrilling – the presence of a grown-up, a player in the market, the alluring silences of power?

Silence abides. Nobody talks. Nobody can talk. No man knows his own mind. Fear prises the body and soul apart as neatly as a scallop knife – pop! He is no longer in control of himself. Someone or something else commands him: the war itself. He runs in expectation of death – any second, any second now – and then his soul will hang around like so much chaff until a stiff breeze disperses it and he will return to the source.

If you said to me, "I do not love, I have never loved," then you would sound incomplete. Equally, if you say "I do not hate, I have never hated," then you sound like half a man.

Losing him would, she realised, be unlike anything she had ever experienced before. A marriage is a conspiracy, a shared aspect toward the rest of the society, a code devised over a long history of negotiation and habit. That code would vanish. Her thoughts would be unobserved, her memories would be hers alone, without the heft that comes from sharing them with another. She would become insubstantial to herself.

The devil steps up to the podium, clears his throat and taps out time with his baton: in come the monstrous iron kettle drums of artillery, joined by a woodwind section of whistling bullets and shrieking shells, the ever-crackling light percussion of rifle fire.