“Most of Muriel’s friends are writers, real writers, not like my old friends who got over it like the flu.”
-Lily King
“Most of Muriel’s friends are writers, real writers, not like my old friends who got over it like the flu.”
-Lily King
“When he visited, Desiree felt like a girl again, the years falling away like meat off the bone.”
-Brit Bennett
“Kids were always needing a Band-Aid, pink skin splitting like summer fruit.”
-Rumaan Alam
“As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint Antoine Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading murmur came rushing along.”
-Charles Dickens
“Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.”
-Patricia Highsmith
“He felt the white scalloped ends of Miguel’s fingernails against his jawbone, running across the margins of him like a poem. Finding something to like, something to correct. Reading, always, with rapt sincerity.”
-Caitlin Horrocks
“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
“Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.”
-Jenny Offill