“When he speaks to her he imagines quite clearly the life they would have had, the life they would be sharing now. It is like walking past a house you used to live in: the fact that it still exists, so concrete, makes everything that has happened since seem somehow insubstantial. Without structure, events are unreal: the reality of his wife, like the reality of the house, was structural, determinative.”
– Rachel Cusk
“L’Ouverture became like a ghost haunting my every waking thought. I took a nap upon coming home from the barbershop, and he even entered my dreams. In my nightmare he was a barber mangling my head.”
– Rion Amilar Scott
“Working alone over Thanksgiving break, it seemed to Roman that he heard a man and a woman speaking in his mind. Listening to them felt intimate and strange, like eavesdropping on conversation between a couple lying in the dark.”
-Lan Samantha Chang
“I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.”
-Anne Lamott
“At sundown they camped at the base of a mesa that rose from the earth like a fist looking out over the plains that glowed golden as the sun disappeared beyond the Organs.”
-Robert James Russell
“Men rode the Tallapoosa River almost three hundred miles from Georgia to Alabama. Then just above the the Tallassee, thirty miles upriver, they built a dam in Montgomery. They come for the water’s strength–the waterfalls. They could power a mill with ’em, wet a town. They carved up Tallassee like cuts of meat. Sold her with the promise she was theirs.”
-Natashia Deón
“This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him on the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize this image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.”
-Katie Kitamura
“They were all growing up exposed to the storms of Mexico and the storms of Latin America, which are worse, if anything, because they are more divided and more desperate. And shimmering like moonlight in those storms, my gaze came to rest on the statues, the silhouettes whose sole possession was a utopia of words, and fairly miserable words at that. Am I being unfair?”
– Roberto Bolaño
“A yellow convertible stopped. A girl leaned out the passenger window and snapped several photographs. She looked at me and laughed, then the convertible sped away, the wind blowing the girl’s blond hair straight up like a flame.”
-Sarai Walker
“Magda was quiet, but her eyes were horribly alive, like blue tigers.”
-Cynthia Ozick
The Simile Museum 