“I had seen how he could shuck truths from men like oyster shells, how he could pry into a breast with a glance and a well-timed word. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.”
-Madeline Miller, Circe
“He closed his eyes. His head felt refreshed from the freezer still, his thoughts moving in an orderly fashion, like children in a snaking line, holding hands and following their teacher out of a building where some dangerous event was commencing. Like little children, his thoughts, innocent, trusting, and afraid. But who was this teacher? She was new to him. He was a transfer. This was his first day.”
-Joy Williams, “The Beach House”
“We ate with our elbows and didn’t speak. We let our knives narrate. My mother caught crickets in the backyard and panfried them with sesame oil. Bent over the table, my father packed his stomach like a suitcase, folding pieces of pork in half before sealing them into his mouth.”
-K-Ming Chang
“Ari did most of his work from home and liked to move his office around at the press of a button, so that the staircase that ran through the center of the building was the only fixed unit, and all the other rooms slid up and down like beads on an abacus.”
-Helen Oyeyemi
“Pandas even head away from other pandas, like stars in the universe, spreading farther and farther apart (you can never be too far away to say goodbye)–except their territory is neither infinite nor expanding, and in order to deliver more panda bears into existence, they can’t just scatter into particles at the end. Pandas come together every two years or so; marriage isn’t always a marriage of the mind.”
-Amy Leach
“Then something inside me feels like dying. I turn my head and cough. Two teeth skip from my mouth and scatter across the deck like dice.”
-Ottessa Moshfegh
“‘I sometimes wonder what I’d see if I could hold your heart in my hands,’ I told him. ‘I imagine it fitting perfectly in my palms, soft and slippery, like gelatin that hasn’t quite set. It might wobble at the slightest touch, but I sense I’d need to hold it carefully, so it wouldn’t slip through my fingers. I also imagine the warmth of the thing. It’s usually hidden deep inside, so it’s much warmer than the rest of me. I close my eyes and sink into that warmth, and when I do, the sensations of all the things that have disappeared come back to me. I can feel all the things you remember there in my hands. Doesn’t that sound marvelous?'”
-Yoko Ogawa
“I got into the Murphy’s car with Sedona and her twin brother, Patrick, and their mother, Maggie; the pigeons were in their wooden case in the back seat, muttering to themselves like old men in a bingo hall.”
-Susan Orlean
“I watch my reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane. My reflection is tall, perhaps rather like an arrow, my blond hair gleams. My face is like a face you have seen many times. My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past.”
-James Baldwin
“But the young woman hasn’t exactly entered, she’s drifted down like a dead leaf, and the lowest depth is behind the door that has Ladies on it, the large, tiled room, with four doors to the right and four doors to the left.”
-Jenny Erpenbeck
The Simile Museum 