Tina Seskis

• "Eleanor sat outside in the car, looking up at the house where she lived. It was a typical English Victorian terrace, small and poky and outwardly tatty, a complete contrast to the smart houses of Maine and the brownstones in Manhattan where she'd grown up. She had an English husband. She had half-English kids. Her life was here. But was it enough? Had it ever been enough? Had she ever fulfilled her potential? Achieved anything of note? It was almost absurd that she didn't even know what 'enough' meant anymore."

• "That things never ever stay the same, not even when you have it all, there in your hand -- it's always destined to change. Get better. Get worse. But never remain. Never stay perfect. After all, timeless perfection was what paintings were for."

• "As she stared at the package, she was filled with an odd sensation, It wasn't hatred as such -- it was far more complex than that. There was pity there, definitely, for the trouble that Gavin Hewitson had gotten himself into. And there was sadness too -- that it seemed Gavin wanted to be loved by her, and she wanted to be loved by Rufus, and Rufus had run back to some unknown other girl, and the world was full of unrequited love and loneliness and fucked-up heads that even the most expensive shrinks in the world couldn't fix, because of course they were fucked up too."

-Excerpts from Home Truths, by Tina Seskis

Donna Tartt

“I wondered, afire with humiliation yet unable to tear my eyes from her. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could ask but still I wanted to know. Did she have nightmares too? Crowd fears? Sweats and panics? Did she have the sense of observing herself from afar, as I often did, as if the explosion had knocked my body and my soul into two separate entities that remained about six feet apart from one another? Her gust of laughter had a self-propelling recklessness I knew all too well from wild nights with Boris, an edge of giddiness and hysteria that I associated (in myself, anyway) with having narrowly missed death. There had been nights in the desert where I was so sick with laughter, convulsed and doubled over with aching stomach for hours on end, I would happily have thrown myself in front of a car to make it stop.”

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life.”

“To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole; but ever since the painting had vanished from under me I felt drowned and extinguished by vastness – not just the predictable vastness of time, and space, but the impossible distances between people even when they were within arms reach of each other, and with a swell of vertigo I thought of all the places I’ve been and all the places I hadn’t, a world lost and vast and unknowable, dingy maze of cities and alleyways, far-drifting ash and hostile immensities, connections missed, things lost and never found, and my painting swept away on that powerful current and drifting out there somewhere: a tiny fragment of spirit, faint spark bobbing on a dark sea.”

- Excerpts from The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Rachel Hollis

“Perception means we don’t see things as they are; we see things as we are. Take a burning house. To a fireman, a burning house is a job to do — maybe even his life‘s work or mission. For an arsonist? A burning house is something exciting and good. What if it’s your house? What if it’s your family who is standing outside watching every earthly possession you own burning up? That burning house becomes something else entirely. You don’t see things as they are; you see things through the lens of what you think and feel and believe. Perception is reality, and I’m here to tell you that your reality is colored much more by your past experiences than by what is actually happening to you. If your past tells you that nothing ever works out, that life is against you, and that you’ll never succeed, then how likely are you to keep fighting for something you want? Or, on the flipside, if you quit accepting no as the end of the conversation whenever you run up against opposition, you can shift your perception and fundamentally reshape your entire life. Every single part of your life — your gratitude, the way you manage stress, how kind you are to others, how happy you are — can be changed by a shift in your perception.”

“Don’t tell me you don’t have it in you to want something more for your life. Don’t tell me you have to give up because it’s difficult. This is life or death too. This is the difference between living a life you always dreamed of or sitting alongside the death of the person you were meant to become. That’s what it feels like to me when I’ve given up on a dream, even for a little while – as if I’m at a wake. As if I’m sitting in a room and looking at the evidence of what could’ve been. I’m sure many of you know what that’s like, and you either want to change it or keep yourself from getting there in the first place. You have to do something about it. You have to reach down inside yourself and remember the reason you started this. You had better find the will to keep going, because if you don’t, I promise you someone else will. And if that happens, girl, you will watch someone else achieve your dreams and enjoy the spoils of their hard-fought battle. And if that happens, you will understand one of the greatest lessons in this life: the only thing worse than giving up is wishing you hadn’t.”

- Excerpts from Girl, Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis

Paul Tremblay

“It was so dark it was like nothing was there in the room with us. Only the nothing was actually something because it filled my eyes and lungs and it sat on my shoulders.”

- Excerpt from A Head Full Of Ghosts, by Paul Tremblay

Cambria Brockman

“If you’re not looking for the rot between us, we all look so happy. Our happiness is contagious. Don’t get too close or you’ll catch it.”

- Excerpt from Tell Me Everything by Cambria Brockman

Madeline Miller

“In a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.”

—

“I felt poised as a hawk on a crag. My talons still held the rock, but my mind was in the air. 

‘I propose a truce,’ I said. ‘A test of sorts.’

‘What sort of test?’  He leaned forward a little. It was a gesture I would come to know. Even he could not hide everything. Any challenge, he would run to meet it. His skin smelled of labor in the sea. He knew ten years of stories. I felt keen and hungry as a bear in the spring. 

‘I have heard,’ I said, ‘that many find their trust in love.’

It surprised him, and oh, I liked the flash of that, before he covered it over. 

‘My lady, only a fool would say no to such an honor. But in truth, I think also only a fool would say yes. I am a mortal. The moment I set down the moly to join you in your bed, you may cast your spell.’ He paused. ‘Unless, of course, you were to swear an oath you will not hurt me, upon the river of the dead.’

An oath by the River Styx would hold even Zeus himself. ‘You are careful,’ I said. 

‘It seems we share that.’

No, I thought. I was not careful. I was reckless, headlong. He was another knife, I could feel it. A different sort, but a knife still. I did not care. I thought: give me the blade. Somethings are worth spilling blood for.”

—

“It was autumn by then, the light thinning, the grass crackling under foot. The month was nearly gone. We were lying in my bed. ‘I think we must leave very soon, or I’ll stay the winter.’
The window was open; the breeze passed over us. It was a trick of his, to set a sentence out like a plate on the table and see what you would put on it.”

—

“I looked into that shining gray gaze, her eyes like two hanging jewels, twisting to catch the light. She was smiling, her hand open towards me, as if ready to receive mine. When she had spoken of children, she had nearly crooned, as if to lull her own babe. But Athena had no babe, and she never would. Her only love was reason. And that has never been the same as wisdom.”

- Excerpts from Circe by Madeline Miller

Lisa Taddeo

“Often, the type of waiting women do is to make sure other women approve, so that they may also approve of themselves.”

—

“We pretend to want things we don’t want so nobody can see us not getting what we need.”

—

“Like many girls her age, Maggie is laid out before the world, unafraid, unpopulated. Men come to insert themselves, they turn a girl into a city. When they leave, their residue remains, the discoloration on the wood where the sun came through every day for many days, until one day it didn’t.“

—

“But you can’t say these things. Because Hoy and everybody else lives in denial. They won’t be honest even in their own brains let alone in a courtroom where everything you say can be used against you. There is no humanity in humans. You palm your arm to smooth down the shivering hairs. They are picking up on a breeze of self-hatred.”

- Excerpts from Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women

Charles Baxter

“As is proper, the children — all grown — have left home. We have three. The oldest, our beautiful daughter Sarah, is, like her mother, a biochemist. She is successful but, so far, unmarried. She would be a handful for any man. I mean this as praise and description. The middle one, Ephraim, is a mathematician and father to three wonderful little ones, our grandchildren. I have pictures here somewhere. Of the youngest, Aaron, who is crazy, I should not speak. And not because he blames me for the mess in his head. No: he deserves to be left alone with his commonplace lunacies — he calls them ideas — and given peace. He lives in Los Angeles.”

-

“I have to admit it: the business gave me a boost. I liked having a place to go in the morning. I liked having a purpose. I liked arriving there before the mall had opened. It’s what you might call a dawn feeling. No doubt there is a word for this in German. Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history.”

-

“That’s all I am going to say about the subject for now. As Chloe says, some things don’t bear much looking into. If you want something to read, then read the white space on the rest of this page. That’s me, down there in the white.”

-

“I thought he was kind of beautiful. I liked thinking about him. My tastes had changed. My concept of male beauty had altered: he was now the definition of it. ... I had shorts on, too. My legs were prettier than they’d been a month or so before. Smoother and nicer-looking. I don’t know why. They just were. Oh, actually I do know why: he loved them.”

-

“Neil Diamond’s Song Sung Blue was blaring over these internment-camp speakers, and I was sitting there with my head in my hands wondering what I was doing in Jackson, Michigan. The colors on the water were turning from magenta to a sort of hot pink, and I was having this insight that my parents had let me loose in the world without explaining anything of importance to me.”

- Excerpts from The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter

Amy Gentry

”Julie has been in the house for a few weeks, and though I am getting used to it, it still feels like someone has rubbed me all over with a rasp. Every pore seems to be open, every hair a fine filament ready to shoot me full of sensation at the slightest breeze. I have been fighting for so long to stifle sensation. I remember when the grief was so potent I would lie on the sofa with the television on drinking vodka gimlets, one after the other, just waiting to pass out, staying as still as possible, teaching myself the art of numbness. And now it is as if I’ve been dropped into scalding water and the numbness has peeled away and the skin underneath is affronted by air. If there is something missing — if I am afraid to love her quite as much as before – it is only because the potential for love feels so big and so intense that I fear I will disappear in the expression of it, that it will blow my skin away like clouds and I will be nothing.”

-

“I keep trying to find the before. But once something like that happens to you, there is no before anymore. It takes the before away. And if there is no before, then there’s no order I can tell it in that makes any sense, and no reason to choose one particular place over any other. I’d start with the shame, but everything gets there eventually. So, no hurry, I guess.”

-

“It was the first time I understood that there was a whole world in there I would never see, a world so distant from me, and so distinct, that to say that Julie was made from me, that she was my daughter and I was her mother, seemed meaningless. I think I loved her more profoundly in that moment than I have ever loved anyone.”

- Excerpts from Good As Gone, by Amy Gentry

Patrick Rothfuss

“It was night again. The Waystone Inn lay in silence, and it was a silence of three parts.

The most obvious part was a hollow, echoing quiet, made by things that were lacking. If there had been a wind it would have sighed through the trees, set the inn’s sign creaking on its hooks, and brushed the silence down the road like trailing autumn leaves. If there had been a crowd, even a handful of men inside the inn, they would have filled the silence with conversation and laughter, the clatter and clamor one expects from a drinking house during the dark hours of night. If there had been music...but no, of course there was no music. In fact there were none of these things, and so the silence remained.

Inside the Waystone a pair of men huddled at one corner of the bar. They drank with quiet determination, avoiding serious discussions of troubling news. In doing this they added a small, sullen silence to the larger, hollow one. It made an alloy of sorts, a counterpoint.

The third silence was not an easy thing to notice. If you listened for an hour, you might begin to feel it in the wooden floor underfoot and in the rough, splintering barrels behind the bar. It was in the weight of the black stone hearth that held the heat of a long dead fire. It was in the slow back and forth of a white linen cloth rubbing along the grain of the bar. And it was in the hands of the man who stood there, polishing a stretch of mahogany that already gleamed in the lamplight.

The man had true-red hair, red as flame. His eyes were dark and distant, and he moved with the subtle certainty that comes from knowing many things.

The Waystone was his, just as the third silence was his. This was appropriate, as it was the greatest silence of the three, wrapping the others inside itself. It was deep and wide as autumn’s ending. It was heavy as a great river-smooth stone. It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.”

-

“Perhaps the greatest faculty our minds possess is the ability to cope with pain. Classic thinking teaches us of the four doors of the mind, which everyone moves through according to their need.

First is the door of sleep. Sleep offers us a retreat from the world and all its pain. Sleep marks passing time, giving us distance from the things that have hurt us. When a person is wounded they will often fall unconscious. Similarly, someone who hears traumatic news will often swoon or faint. This is the mind's way of protecting itself from pain by stepping through the first door.

Second is the door of forgetting. Some wounds are too deep to heal, or too deep to heal quickly. In addition, many memories are simply painful, and there is no healing to be done. The saying 'time heals all wounds' is false. Time heals most wounds. The rest are hidden behind this door.

Third is the door of madness. There are times when the mind is dealt such a blow it hides itself in insanity. While this may not seem beneficial, it is. There are times when reality is nothing but pain, and to escape that pain the mind must leave reality behind.

Last is the door of death. The final resort. Nothing can hurt us after we are dead, or so we have been told.”

-

“In the midst of silence Lyra stood by Lanre’s body and spoke his name. Her voice was a commandment. Her voice was steel and stone. Her voice told him to live again. But Lanre lay motionless and dead.

In the midst of fear Lyra knelt by Lanre’s body and breathed his name. Her voice beckoning.  Her voice was love and longing. Her voice called him to live again. But Lance lay dead and cold.

In the midst of despair Lyra fell across Lanre’s body and wept his name. Her voice was a whisper. Her voice was echo and emptiness. Her voice begged him to live again. But Lanre lay breathless and dead.”

-

“‘All stories are true,’ Skarpi said. ‘But this one really happened, if that’s what you mean.’ He took another slow drink, then smiled again, his bright eyes dancing. ‘More or less. You have to be a bit of a liar to tell a story the right way. Too much truth confuses the facts. Too much honesty makes you sound insincere.’

-

“‘No matter where she stood, she was in the center of the room.’ Kvothe frowned. ‘Do not misunderstand. She was not loud, or vain. We stare at a fire because it flickers, because it glows. The light is what catches our eyes, but what makes a man lean close to a fire has nothing to do with its bright shape. What draws you to a fire is the warmth that you feel when you come near. The same was true of Denna.’”

-

“I stopped walking. ‘Selas flower.’  She stopped and turned to look at me. ‘All this and you pick a flower I don’t know? What is a Selas flower? Why?’ ‘It is a deep red flower that grows on a strong vine. Its leaves are dark and delicate. They grow best in shadowy places, but the flower itself finds stray sunbeams to bloom in.’  I looked at her. ‘That suits you. There is much of you that is both shadow and light. It grows in deep forests, and it is rare because only skilled folk can tend one without harming it. It has a wonderous smell and is much sought and seldom found. . . ‘What flower would you bring me?’ I teased, thinking to catch her off guard. ‘A willow blossom,’ she said without a second’s hesitation. I thought for a long minute. ‘Do willows have blossoms?’  She looked up and to the side, thinking. ‘I don’t think so.’ ‘A rare treat to be given one then.’ I chuckled. ‘Why a willow blossom?’ ‘You remind me of the Willow.’ She said easily. ‘Strong, deep-rooted, and hidden. You move easily when the storm comes, but never farther than you wish.’  I lifted my hands as if fending off a blow. ‘Cease these sweet words!’ I protested. ‘You seek to bend me to your will, but it will not work. Your flattery is naught to me but wind!’  She watched me for a moment, as if to make sure my tirade was complete. ‘Beyond all other trees,’ she said with a curl of a smile on her elegant mouth, ‘the Willow moves to the wind’s desire.’”

-

“Such was our conversation. But not only were we lacking touch to guide us, it was as if we were also strangely deaf. So we danced very carefully, unsure what music the other was listening to, unsure, perhaps, if the other was dancing at all.”

-

“Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts. There are seven words that will make a person love you. There are ten words that will break a strong man’s will. But a word is nothing but a painting of a fire. A name is the fire itself.”

- Prologue and excerpts of The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

-

“I brought the lute out of its shabby case and began to tune it. It was not the finest lute in the Eolian. Not by half. Its neck was slightly bent, but not bowed. One of the pegs was loose and was prone to changing its tune ... I touched the loose peg gently, running my hands over the warm wood of the lute. The varnish was scraped and scuffed in places. It had been treated unkindly in the past, but that didn’t make it less lovely underneath. So yes. It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”

- Excerpt from Wise Man’s Fear, by Patrick Rothfuss

Daniel Keyes

“April 3 — Finished Robinson Crusoe. I want to find out more about what happens to him but Miss Kinnian says that’s all there is. WHY.”

-

“April 6 — Today, I learned, the comma, this is, a, comma (,) a period, with, a tail, Miss Kinnian, says its, importent, because, it makes writing, better, she said, somebody, could lose, a lot, of money, if a comma, isnt in, the right, place, I got, some money, that I, saved from, my job, and what, the foundation, pays me, but not, much and, I dont, see how, a comma, keeps, you from, losing it, but, she says, everybody, uses commas, so Ill, use them, too,,,,”

-

“I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”

-

“But then it hit me like a fist against the side of my head that I didn’t remember what I had to do. It was as if I had been looking at the whole thing clearly on the blackboard of my mind, but when I turned to read it, part of it had been erased and the rest didn’t make sense.”

- Excerpts from Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes