Quick: Aphorisms

The highly anticipated follow-up to the wildly popular Glimpse

Quick is George Murray’s second collection of aphorisms — a form that straddles the lines between poetry, philosophy, humour, and prose. He describes these pieces as “poetic essences” — sometimes even as “poems, without all the poetry getting in the way.” Some are deep, some clever, some funny, some all three. The best, he says, should read like common-sense statements that have never actually been expressed.

Built out of more than 450 short statements, Quick is a series of thoughts and ruminations, any one of which could be an entire poem but instead has been compressed into a single profundity. Following his bestselling Glimpse, Murray continues to explore a wide range of themes: from deep existential disquiet to the comforts of the meaning of belief; from what it means to be alive to how the world deals with hate, love, the sublime, and the ridiculous.