“It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It does…”— Oriah Mountain Dreamer, amazon.com
“You think because he doesn’t love you that you are worthless. You think that because he doesn’t want you anymore that he is right — that his judgement and opinion of you are correct. If he throws you out, then you are garbage. You think he belongs to you because you want to belong to him. Don’t. It’…”— Toni Morrison, amazon.com
“So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“There's something to be said for hunger: at least it lets you know you're still alive.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise there are only two dimensions. Otherwise you live with your face squashed up against a wall, everything a huge foreground, of details, close-ups, ha…”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“We were the people who were not in the papers. We lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. It gave us more freedom. We lived in the gaps between the stories.”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“For weeks Tyrone thought he was going to die any minute, and there were also times when he was afraid he wasn't going to die.”— Hubert Selby Jr., amazon.com
“Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It's like the tide going out, revealing whatever's been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with o…”— Margaret Atwood, amazon.com
“He told me once to be brave, and though I have stood still while knives spun toward my face and jumped off a roof, I never thought I would need bravery in the small moments of my life. I do.”— Veronica Roth, amazon.com
“Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, every one. We can’t escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other”— Veronica Roth, amazon.com
“It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.”— Miranda July, amazon.com
“I knew the beginning and the end – I just had to dream up a convincing middle.”— Miranda July, amazon.com
“Our habits slid apart easily...And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled? Did some new couple in China do them? Were a Swedish man and woman foot to foot at this very moment?”— Miranda July, amazon.com
“I laughed and said, Life is easy. What I meant was, Life is easy with you here, and when you leave, it will be hard again.”— Miranda July, amazon.com
“I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this—caring for this boy—as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live foreve…”— Miranda July, amazon.com