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