I had artistic classical training, and when you learn the classics for so many years, you might gain audacity, power and confidence to subvert everything. I am like the originals buffoons. I love the rules because I can break them.

— Nuno Roque

Secrets are dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.

— Carla H. Krueger

Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.

— Carla H. Krueger

Without pride, man becomes a parasite – and there are already too many parasites.

— Carla H. Krueger

Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Květniv’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.

— Carla H. Krueger

Shame comes in different doses.

— Carla H. Krueger

That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?

— Judith Butler

It’s late and most of the clerks are at home in their beds, dreaming of swimming in pools filled with real money.

— Carla H. Krueger

To Kalist, Baumauer’s just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.

— Carla H. Krueger

Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... The decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art.

— Asti Hustvedt