Lines to live by: Eight debut authors share the literary quotes that shaped them

– From Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (1979)

“I first read Suttree maybe eight years ago. McCarthy has a reputation for the dense, baroque prose style that he frontloads most of his novels with – but by midway through he often settles into a second register: flinty, hyper-compressed sentences that use one word where other writers would require two or three. This is my preferred McCarthy. His obvious authority over grammar and syntax makes his work feel masterful but still so alive.”

– From The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde (1891)

“With Smallie, my goal was to tell the stories of those affected by the Windrush scandal[where several British subjects born in the Caribbean were wrongly detained and sometimes deported due to lack of legal documentation] and the injustice of it. Windrush is at the forefront of more conversations today than when I was initially writing the novel. It’s great to be relevant to the moment but where will my novel be in years to come, if people are still reading it?”

– From Something That Needs Nothing by Miranda July (2006) 

“Both [July and I] take the inner lives of teenage girls very seriously – something still not often seen in literature and media. These characters all too quickly become relegated to being clueless, shallow or sex objects, so there’s something freeing and rehumanising when we’re allowed to focus on the world of a teenage girl who is actually wise and knowing, even if she goes about figuring her life out in unwise ways.”

– From Consciousness Self-Learns by Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge (2018)

“The delirious texture of Berssenbrugge’s line seemed in tune with a sudden state of aliveness: the sentence trails around and towards coherence right up until the final word ‘intends’. With this as the crux of the line, it’s as if sensing itself possesses intention and therefore gives agency or provides a quality of planning to the act of sensing. I wonder if that makes the line about faith, or a movement towards faith?”

“On every new thing there lies already the shadow of annihilation.”

– From The Rings of Saturn by W G Sebald (1995)

“I’ve noticed something about myself, which is an obsession with death. The things that interest me often require death to ‘be’, such as memory, history and the past – and this line speaks to the desire and the necessity to hold on. I vacillate between whether death gives birth to literature or not. Without it, we wouldn’t have the desire to make something that lasts. The Renovation is a text that couldn’t exist without this shadow of death over it either.”

– From The Return by Hisham Matar (2016)

“So much of Chasing Freedom is the acknowledgement of differences and separations. My book begins with reckoning with what it means to be born free, to be born into a generation of my native Zimbabwe that never lived under direct colonial rule. This is in stark contrast to my father. He was a guerrilla soldier in the anti-colonial uprising. The political parties that he staked his life on turned carnivorous under the leadership of Robert Mugabe. He was twice a political prisoner. I was born on the same land as my father but a very different country. Interviews with him about it were fraught with ethical questions. How are we meeting? As father and son? Or as researcher and subject? The defining drama in our family is that same ‘separation’ and ‘disorientation’ that Matar speaks of.”

“Your shadow covers this page.”

– From As One Listens to the Rain by Octavio Paz, tr. Elliot Weinberger (1998)

“This is the final line of Paz’s poem [“As One Listens to the Rain”]. There’s something beautiful about inviting the reader in with the second person – and I love the veil that comes down between the reader and a writer when there’s a translator in between. It feels so mysterious. Even with a really good translation, I do enjoy that it sounds ever so slightly stilted or unnatural. It has its own poetic effect. There’s so much of this poem that I find unknowable in a pleasant way, so much so that I printed it out and I had it on the door of my fridge when I was at college.”

– From Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath (1953) 

This line is repeated several times throughout the poem [“Mad Girl’s Love Song”], always in parentheses, like it’s a private thought – and I love the different ways you can read into it. ‘I must have made you up inside my head because you are just so wonderful’, or ‘I made you up inside my head, you don’t really exist and I must be mad.’ Over the years, my interpretation has shifted from the former to the latter – less romantic, more terrifying. But I love how it holds the possibility of both.