“The nuns working in the garden rise up like a family of pine martens to watch her drawing near.”
-Lauren Groff
“The nuns working in the garden rise up like a family of pine martens to watch her drawing near.”
-Lauren Groff

“When he painted a portrait, he made a crayon sketch and then began painting straight across. Gertrude Stein said it was like pulling down a curtain as slowly moving as one of his Swiss glaciers. Slowly he pulled the curtain down and by the time he was at the bottom of the canvas, there you were.”
-Gertrude Stein
“They are beautiful and composed, like a house where no one lives, but which a staff cleans daily.”
– Amal El-Mohtar, Max Gladstone
“Maria sits on the pallet, hands in her lap like broken sparrows.”
-Anthony Doerr
“You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone.”
-James Baldwin

“The operatic tradition had always been divided over the relationship between music and drama, and this debate had reemerged in Lloyd Webber’s day. His contemporary Stephen Sondheim was a studied modernist who brought dramatic heft to musical theater in the 1970s. By contrast, Lloyd Webber had no ear for drama; his characters simply declaimed their emotions directly into the audience, as if by T-shirt cannon.”
-Andrea Long Chu
“And here, the baptismal gowns of lost children, like limp little ghosts.”
-Kirstin Valdez Quade
“Corresponding with him was like playing squash with an opponent who pockets your serve, walks off the court and returns four months later to fire it back.”
-Dwight Garner
“I drove home, weeping out of helplessness. My hands were shaking, and now I knew this would end badly. With a sigh of relief, the Samurai stopped outside the house, as if it were on my side in everything, I pressed my face against the steering wheel. The horn responded sadly, like a summons. Like a cry of mourning.”
-Olga Tokarczuk
“She looked to be in her midthirties, about fifteen or so years behind him, and rather tall, with long straight hair parted to the right and rounded eyes like the portholes on a ship.”
-Pitchaya Sudbanthad