Lauren Beukes

"People don't want novelty – they want the reassurance of familiarity. No-one wants to be challenged, no-one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation."

"Affectionate violence. For when a hug just won't do."

"She would disappear folded like origami into her own dreams."

"Fresh starts don't come with expired relationships attached."

"This is the Detroit I want to write about," he says, feeling urbane as fuck. "Tattoo seances and nutty street art and text-message millionaires. People don't even know this is happening. Of course we know it's happening, shithead," Anorexic Thor says. "You don't know it's happening."

"Everyone lives three versions of themselves; a public life, a private life and a secret life. Watch any kid and how he acts with his friends at school. Ask his momma what he’s like at home. Try and get her to believe the same kid robbed the corner store. “Not my boy,” she’ll say and she’s right. Because her boy wouldn’t do that. But we are different things to different people in different contexts."

"She was always bad cop in the family, setting rules and boundaries as if parenting wasn’t the worst game of improve ever."

"An empty house feels a certain way. Ripe with absence."

"Fear festers in the imagination. It’s not fear’s fault. That’s just the way it’s made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb."

"But I really wanted to believe that there were these magic celestial bodies that would direct my life, tell me what to do, and it turns out it's not stars, it's some bits of screwy DNA. I'm just meat with faulty programming."

"Fear festers in the imagination. It’s not fear’s fault. That’s just the way it’s made."

"Fear makes you ugly."

"No one said it would be pretty, yanking despair out of a woman."

"Time heals all wounds. Wounds clot, eventually. The seams knit together."

"Sometime I think I'd like to torture him to death. Other times, I think I'd forgive him. Because that would be worse."

"Do not settle. Never fucking settle."

"The future is not as loud as war, but it is relentless with a terrible fury all its own."

"And the bitch about the new world order: it requires money, same as the old one. She feels betrayed by all the apocalypses of pop culture that promised abandoned cities ripe for the looting."

"The axles of corruption are greased with donut glaze."

"The world is condensing, attention spans narrowing to tiny screens, and there are people who are wittier and smarter, who know how to write for those nanospaces."

"and then no one was flying anywhere. You can’t imagine how much the world can change in six months."

"Hell isn't other people, it's other parents."

"She laughs, and that's really all he wanted."

"You think fear eats up your capacity for wonder, but the awe cuts through her dulled and dimmed mind. Almost a religious experience."