“The engagement was short, and secretly Yanli was very disappointed; she’d always heard that these were the best days of one’s life. Even so, she was very happy when the wedding day arrived. That morning, combing her hair while still half asleep, she lifted her arms up, looked in the mirror, and felt a strange sense of invigoration—as if she’d been crammed into a glass test tube and was now pushing her head up to pop the lid off, ready to leap from the present into future.”
– Eileen Chang
“Later, when I got home, I went into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror for a while. It was the same mirror Katie and I used to stare at in the pitch black while chanting ‘Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary’ over and over until we hallucinated the beheaded head of Mary Queen of Scots emerging in reflection, dripping like a porterhouse steak.”
-Stacey Richter
“He had never presented flowers to Fiona before. Or to anyone else. He entered the building feeling like a hopeless lover or a guilty husband in a cartoon.”
-Alice Munro
“And she said, Oh, Jon, you break my heart, that night when you came to my Tarp you were like a lion taking what he wanted but now you are like some bunny wiffling his nose in fright.”
-George Saunders
“A week later López Azcárate hanged himself from a tree and the news ran through the university like a terrified, fleet-footed animal.
-Roberto Bolaño
“Holidays, folks buzzed and flitted about like fruit flies, yet as a child you lacked the power to shoo them.”
-John Keene
“Darkness fills her like a carbohydrate.”
-Daniela Gioseffi
“My kids would have to dive in, live through the agony, and come out the other side. They’d have to learn to lie on the lawn watching ants scale the grass blades; they’d have to linger, digits pruning, in the bathtub; they’d have to stop, to be still, and then to wait, and wait, and wait, allowing time to fatten around them, like a dewdrop on the tip of a leaf. And then, only then, who know what they might imagine or invent?”
– Claire Messud
“Better to stand by the grave and try to remember some photo of him sitting on a bench in Brooklyn, or bring to mind one of those recordings of his voice, at once powerful but broken, like that of someone who has passed many hours in solitude and acquired conviction though constant doubt.”
-Valeria Luiselli
“Between drivers and employers there are still sliding glass panels. There are still fold-down seats. A car is still as big as a bedroom.”
– Marguerite Duras
The Simile Museum 