I am looking for a YA horror/dystopian novel which I read in around 2008. The novel was set in a dystopian version of the modern (1990s/early 2000s) world; in the opening pages two teenagers break into a car to steal it and it turns out to be a trap, kidnapping them and driving them autonomously ...

It starts with the girl working in a fake antiquity-making factory where she drops a large and heavy vase, shattering it. When she drops the vase, the owner comes out and is extremely angry enough that he takes out a whip to hit her. She expects to be stricken, but the male protagonist holds the ...

There is a poem by William Blake called "Auguries of Innocence". It starts with a quatrain (whose relation to the rest of the poem is not immediately apparent to me) describing a powerful kind of vision/imagination which transcends normal ability. The poem then has a series of couplets which broa...

I read this book maybe 4-5 yrs ago (no more than seven) on Wattpad. It was the first part. (that site has atrocious search & find.) It was titled 'Thorned Gods'? It was fiction/magic set in the 21st century but hidden from humanity. Various families and people in the know how weren't allowed to d...

Clodsley Shovel: a talking mole who plays a minor role in Prince Caspian. Cloudesley Shovell: a British admiral who died off the Isles of Scilly. What's going on here? Did Lewis ever acknowledge the connection or give a reason why? Is there any thematic reason why this mole character would be nam...

I read that a long time ago, don't remember many details. It was a short story written in English. About a city where clocks were forbidden. Workers in the city have wristbands with different colours to indicate their turns (say orange=morning, blue=afternoon, etc). Lectures at schools would star...

A user new to the site recently asked for the identification of a poem output by a large language model (some version of OpenAI's ChatGPT). The user had asked the model for a poem in German on a given subject, and the model had output some lines of German verse, together with an attribution to th...

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important. This quote has been attributed to TS Eliot, but I can't find any sources for it outside lists of inspirational quotes, and self-help books. Does anyone know if he did actually say or write this? If so, when/where?