Rebecca Serle

• "It feels impossible how much space there can be in this intimacy, how much privacy. And I think that maybe that is what love is. Not the absence of space but the acknowledgment of it, the thing that lives between the parts, the things that makes it possible not to be one, but to be different, to be two."

• "They say that languages come better to people who are right-brained, but I'm not so sure. I think you need a certain looseness, a certain fluidity, to speak another language. To take all the words in your brain and turn them over, one by one, like stones—and find something else scrolled on the underside."

• "You mistake love. You think it has to have a future in order to matter, but it doesn't. It's the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn't require a future."

~ Excerpts from In Five Years, by Rebecca Serle

Sarah Gailey

• "It didn't occur to me at the time to be irritated by how quickly he folded when he had those easy fights. I thought he was being reasonable. It didn't occur to me to suspect the way he talked about loving my mind. I was young, and I was accustomed to a very different kind of man. It didn't occur to me to watch for cowardice the same way I watched for anger."

• "My mother had spent the duration of her marriage to my father whittling pieces of herself away, leaving void space for him to whiff through when he swung his fury at her. Once he was gone, she grew to fill those spaces again—to take up the amount of room she should always have been allotted."

• "The way I see it, you mostly stop loving a person the same way you stop respecting them. It can happen all at once if something enormous and terrible falls over the two of you. But for the most part, it happens in inches. In a thousand tiny moments of contempt that unravel the image you had of the person you thought you knew."

~ Excerpts from The Echo Wife, by Sarah Gailey

Noah Hawley

"Scott rides uptown three stops, then gets out and takes the bus going downtown. He is in a new world now, collision city, filled with suspicion and distrust. There is no room for abstract thought here, no room to ruminate on the nature of things. This is the other thing that died in the turbulent Atlantic. To be an artist is to live at once in the world and apart from it. Where an engineer sees form and function, an artist sees meaning. A toaster, to the engineer, is an array of mechanical and electrical components that work together to apply heat to bread, creating toast. To the artist, a toaster is everything else. It is a comfort creation machine, one of many mechanical boxes in a dwelling that create the illusion of home. Anthropomorphized, it is a hang-jawed man who never tires of eating. Open his mouth and put in the bread. But poor Mr. Toaster Oven. He's a man who, no matter how much he eats, is never truly fed."

~ Excerpt from Before the Fall, by Noah Hawley

V.E. Schwab

• "Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself. Like Peter, in J.M.'s Peter Pan. There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten."

• "What she needs are stories. Stories are a way to preserve one's self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one."

~ Excerpts from The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab

Sonja Yoerg

• "But once children develop a theory of mind, once they get that not everybody sees and knows what they do, their horizons explode. Hide-and-seek works because they don’t leave bits of themselves sticking out. Secrets become possible. Telling the truth becomes optional. And emotions get complicated. The moment you see yourself as others see you, you become self-conscious. Welcome to embarrassment and shame. And empathy. There is a bright side."

• "Isn’t that what love is, the belief that you exist in the private world of someone else’s mind as a beautiful, cherished being? Perhaps that’s the problem with love: it’s unverifiable."

• "Blind spots are one example of the guessing and filling in that go on routinely in the brain, all in the name of efficiency. The world is fairly predictable, so it makes sense for the brain to rely on expectations, to see what is usually there, and not bother to build the world from scratch every time you open your eyes. The object on the side of the highway appears to be a truck tire, not a dead body, because that’s more likely. Most of the time, the truth doesn’t matter."

• "Perhaps everyone has stories they keep in a lockbox, stories they are not willing to own much less share. But if you don’t acknowledge your own history—all of it, especially the underside—then aren’t you creating blind spots of your own?"

~ Excerpts from Stories We Never Told, by Sonja Yoerg

Leigh Bardugo

• “If she suddenly threw herself in a river or off a building or into traffic, there would be plenty of warning signs to point to. Did she seem depressed? She was distant. She didn’t make many friends. She was struggling in her classes. All true. But would it have mattered if she’d been someone else? If she’d been a social butterfly, they would have said she liked to drink away her pain. If she’d been a straight-A student, they would have said she’d been eaten alive by her perfectionism. There were always excuses for why girls died.”

• “That was what magic did. It revealed the heart of who you'd been before life took away your belief in the possible. It gave back the world all lonely children longed for.”

• “Sometimes it took Alex and Hellie hours, sometimes days, but they always came back. There was too much world. There were too many choices, and those only seemed to lead to more choices. That was the business of living, and neither of them had ever acquired the skill.”

-Excerpts from Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo

Claire McGowan

• "Now that I’d lost you, it seemed to me the hardest thing a human would ever have to face was how to live without the person their heart was tied to. Every day I had to remind my brain and body I was never going to see you again. Remind my skin it would never feel your hands again. Remind my hands they would never touch your back as you slept. Never. I don’t think humans are really built to understand what that means. I told myself it should have been easy. All I had to do was go into my house, and shut the door, and live out the rest of my life without you."

• "When you hear stories about women who are married to serial killers – Sonia Sutcliffe, for example – or whose husbands turn out to have four other families stashed away, you always say, how could she not know? She must have known. But I realised now that some people were just so good at lying that you not only believed them, you actually did your best to. You so much want to believe that what they tell you is true, you do the lying for them."

~ Excerpts from The Other Wife, by Claire McGowan