“But Shunt, he thirsted for understanding with obsessive perseverance. It was a pathology in this way, and pathologies aren't hobbies to be entertained through the inclination of the willing. With some assertion, you certainly can't direct a pathology: it directs, contorts, warps, wears you. Shunt walked through school, down his bedroom corridor, high-ceiling'd and close-panelled, over asphalt as hot as holiday sex, in his head, always relegated to a realm of internal mystery, a sphere of indecipherable symbols that were filtered in, held fast to, but never understood. He saw things or deduced things, and they were there for eternity. Once Shunt had them inside, it was impossible to divorce or expunge them, and so there they remained, infecting his peace and placidity of mind, thoughts like foreign bodies entering a gaping, unquenched wound, and after that Shunt's life devolved into the gangrene set in by these unpurged foreign bodies. Shunt suffered from epilepsy and a panic disorder. He didn't know who he was. He was not a funny person, a wise person, a valorous person, a soft person. Shunt was epilepsy and a panic disorder, and that's as encompassing as his personality had ever been. When you suffer a pathology it directs, contorts, warps, wears you.”

“You cannot separate passion from pathology any more than you can separate a person's spirit from his body.”

“He could smoke through the water as though an aquamarine submarine, he could sever the festoonery of the poolside ebb and eddy into fiery fluttering swathes of hot-cut flax, he could treble beneath the meniscus of the pool, sharp as synthesiser music and with a trajectory of theological impermanence, a crucifixion affected underwater, a kingfisher with the velocity and capriciousness of a shooting star, a knife in the arm of a masochist, a cleft hatchet of rock through the porous orb of a sea urchin, a dick through butter, a tyrannical nutter, Shunt through water, watch Shunt corrupt your daughter. He could move in wet like a lion through wildebeest.”

“He had a book to finish. Ten-thousand words. The other ninety thousand had been difficult. This last tenth seemed impossible. His plot had become derailed. He was unable to see his way through the smoke and coke dust of a mythical railway track that should stretch ahead. Yes, the characters were there, good and solid. Indeed, the story's engine was strong and had shunted yet forward and forward, with only one or two sharp halts. But six weeks ago he met the bumpers. R. was now stuck in a deserted station, his progress blocked. ("Out Back")”

“All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities.”

“He was in way over his head... We're held accountable for our stupidity & moral ignorance... Arrogant condescension...suffering from self-hatred which comes along with a terrible nostalgia for the way we imagine things were, the nostalgia of defeat...breeds tyrants... He can hold his liquor, I'll give him that. It's a generational skill,...indicative of a pathology.”