Fiction

Non-Fiction

And The Ass Saw The Angel

Nick Cave

"Three greasy brother crows wheel, beak to heel, cutting a circle into the bruised and troubled sky, making fast, dark rings through the thicksome bloats of smoke. For so long the lid of the valley was clear and blue but now, by God, it roars."

Acid Dreams: History of LSD, CIA & The 60s Martin A. Lee & Bruce Shlain

"Accurate information could not always be obtained from people under the influence of LSD because it induced a “marked anxiety and loss of reality contact.” The bizarre hallucinations caused by the drug often proved more of a hindrance than an aid to the interrogation process."

Catch-22

Joseph Heller

"Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. If he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to, but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to.”

Fermat's Last Theorem

Simon Singh

"Proof is what lies at the heart of maths, and is what marks it out from other sciences. Other sciences have hypotheses that are tested against experimental evidence until they fail, and are overtaken by new hypotheses. In maths, absolute proof is the goal, and once something is proved, it is proved forever, with no room for change.’"

A Clockwork Orange

Anthony Burgess

“The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories. Cram criminals together and see what happens. You get concentrated criminality, crime in the midst of punishment. Soon we may be needing all our prison space for political offenders.”

Genius: Richard Feynman & Modern Physics

James Gleick

“Even when quantum physics worked, in the sense of predicting nature's behavior, it left scientists with an uncomfortable blank space where their picture of reality was supposed to be.”

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

“A special form of misery had begun to oppress him of late. There was nothing poignant, nothing acute about it; but there was a feeling of permanence, of eternity about it; it brought a foretaste of hopeless years of this cold leaden misery, a foretaste of an eternity "on a square yard of space.”

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat

Oliver Sacks

“If a man has lost a leg or an eye, he knows he has lost a leg or an eye; but if he has lost a self - himself - he cannot know it, because he is no longer there to know it.”

Dune

Frank Herbert

"When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movements become headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thoughts of obstacles and forget the precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late."

The Meaning of Everything

Simon Winchester

"Until the very beginning of the seventeenth century, a time when the English language could quite probably number fully a quarter of a million words among its riches, there was not a single book in existence that attempted to list even a small fraction of them."

Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas

Hunter S. Thompson

“Every now and then when your life gets complicated and the weasels start closing in, the only cure is to load up on heinous chemicals and then drive like a bastard from Hollywood to Las Vegas"

The Music of The Primes

Marcus Du Sautoy

"Mathematicians can't bear to admit that there might not be an explanation for the way Nature has picked the primes. If there were no structure to mathematics, no beautiful simplicity, it would not be worth studying."

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy

Douglas Adams

“And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.”

The Origins of The Second World War

A.J.P. Taylor

"Not only did the British and French urge concessions on the Czechs. The British also urged Hitler to make demands. This took him by surprise; events were moving faster, and more favourably, than he had hoped, though not quite according to his expectations."

Interview With The Vampire

Anne Rice

“And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does not exist, then life...every second of it...is all we have.”

The Prize: The Quest For Oil Money & Power Daniel Yergin

"Continuing wealth from the single commodity is taken for granted. The government, flush with wealth, is expected to be generous. When the price of that commodity drops, a government which would remain in power dare not cut back on this generosity.”

Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.”

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

“Tune your television to any channel it doesn't receive and about 1 % of the dancing static you see is accounted for by this ancient remnant of the Big Bang. The next time you complain that there is nothing on, remember that you can always watch the birth of the universe.”

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Philip K. Dick

“It takes a certain amount of courage, he thought, to face yourself and say with candor, I'm rotten. I've done evil and I will again. It was no accident; it emanated from the true, authentic me."

South: Shackleton's Last Expedition

Ernest Shackleton

"Fried slices of blubber seem to our taste to resemble crisp bacon. It certainly is no hardship to eat it, though persons living under civilized conditions probably would shudder at it. The hardship would come if we were unable to get it.”