“The man laughed and left us on the curb and went back and handed a bill to the driver in the middle of a great honking and some yelling, and then we saw the girls from the magazine moving off in a row, one cab after another, like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids.”
-Sylvia Plath
“Truth is, I hardly understood half of what the gold man said. I’d never seen a train, didn’t know the ocean route he spoke of, or where the workers had come from. But I understood his gold. I didn’t ask questions. He had a gold watch the size of my palm that he flicked as he talked. He was fat enough that I could cling like a tick to his wealth.”
-C Pam Zhang
“Reva was like the pills I took. They turned everything, even hatred, even love, into fluff I could bat away. And that was exactly what I wanted–my emotions passing like headlights that shine softly through a window, sweep past me, illuminate something vaguely familiar, then fade and leave me in the dark again.”
-Ottessa Moshfegh
“And Rod snuck Poke into Minute Maid Park on an off night during the playoffs, a favor from an ex, and they walked from aisle to aisle palming the backs of every seat, mouthing the names of Astros who’d walked the field before them—Biggio, Oswalt, Peña, and Altuve—muttered like saints under their breath.”
-Bryan Washington
“He offered an explanation, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like holes that worms bore into wood, and how upon finding one he was able to expand and stretch it the way a glassblower turns a dollop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe, and how he then allowed time to flow like water at one mouth while causing it to thicken like syrup at the other.”
-Ted Chiang
“Ingrid Bergman is a mountain of a woman, tall and robust, but in this movie she is worn down like a sand dune.”
-Carmen Maria Machado
“Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.”
-Jenny Offill
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke
“Rather than fabulous and enviable, then, I felt in London the way you do when you take one step too many at the bottom of a flight of stairs: brought up short by the unexpected plateau and its dull, unyielding thud.”
-Lisa Halliday
“While we sped through the city, the air scraping against my face, I felt like a kite not quite catching the wind, thinking that if he could go just for a little longer and if I tightened my grip, I might take flight.”
-Christopher Gonzalez
