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He saw the sunlight leave the grass like an eye suddenly closed.

Peter Ackroyd, Hawksmoor, 1993

No matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim,

there are some things we can never assign to oblivion,

​memories we can never rub away.

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2005

Erasure is never merely a matter of making things disappear: there is always some detritus strewn about in the aftermath, some bruising to the surface from which word or image has been removed, some reminder of the violence done to make the world look new again. Whether rubbed away, crossed out or reinscribed, the rejected entity has a habit of returning, ghostlike: if only in the marks that usurp its place and attest to its passing.

Brian Dillon, The Revelation of Erasure, Tate Etc. Issue 8, 2006

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Blessed are the forgetful.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 1886

pulvis et umbra sumus

Quintus Horatius Flaccus, The Odes of Horace, 23 BC

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In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.”

Rachel Louise Carson (1907 - 1964)

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The light touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931

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When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp.

I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature.

Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1862

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Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.

Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000

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To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges.

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Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs & Human Imagination, 2001