Iain Reid

“But isn’t being alone closer to the truest version of ourselves, when we’re not linked to another, not diluted by their presence and judgments? We form relationships with others, friends, family. That’s fine. Those relationships don’t bind the way love does. We can still have lovers, short-term. But only when alone can we focus on ourselves, know ourselves. How can we know ourselves without this solitude?”

- Excerpt from I'm Thinking of Ending Things, by Iain Reid

Mary Karr

"I loved the idea that looking at a painting or listening to a concerto could make you somehow 'transcend' the day-in, day-out bullshit that grinds you down: how in one instant of pure attention you could draw something inside that made you forever larger."

"Because it took so long for me to paste together what happened, I will leave that part of the story missing for a while. It went long unformed for me, and I want to keep it that way here. I don't mean to be coy. When the truth would be unbearable, the mind often just blanks it out. But some ghost of an event may stay in your head. Then, like the smudge of a bad word quickly wiped off a school blackboard, this ghost can call undue attention to itself by its very vagueness. You keep studying the dim shape of it, as if the original form will magically emerge. This blank spot in my past, then, spoke most loudly to me by being blank. It was a hole in my life that I both feared and kept coming back to because I couldn't quite fill it in."

- Excerpts from The Liars' Club, by Mary Karr

Marcel Proust

“With books, there is no forced sociability. If we pass the evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we leave them, we do so with regret, and when we have left them, there are none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement by someone else.”

- Excerpt from Marcel Proust's essay, “On Reading,” from 1905.

Philip K. Dick

“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed—run over, maimed, destroyed—but they continued to play anyhow.”

“Imagine being sentient but not alive. Seeing and even knowing, but not alive. Just looking out. Recognizing but not being alive. A person can die and still go on. Sometimes what looks out at you from a person's eyes maybe died back in childhood.”

- Excerpts from A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick

Emma Donoghue

“'I think about Old Nick carrying me into the truck. I'm dizzy like I'm going to fall down.'
'Scared is what you're feeling,' says Ma, 'but brave is what you're doing.'
'Huh?'
'Scaredybrave.'
'Scave.'
Word sandwiches always make her laugh, but I wasn't being funny.”

- Excerpt from Room, by Emma Donoghue

Allen Eskens

"Oddly enough, my high school guidance counselor never mentioned the word 'college' in any of our meetings. Maybe she could smell the funk of hopelessness that clung to my second-hand clothing. Maybe she had heard that I started working at a dive bar called the Piedmont Club the day after I turned eighteen. Or—and this is where I'd place my bet—maybe she knew who my mother was and figured that no one can change the sound of an echo."

"As far back as I could remember, my mom had been prone to wild mood swings—laughing and dancing across the living room one minute, throwing dishes around the kitchen the next—classic bipolar from what I understand. Of course that diagnosis was never made official because my mother refused to get professional help. Instead, she lived her life with her fingers in her ears, as though the truth would not exist if she never heard the words spoken aloud. Add to that cauldron an ever-increasing measure of cheap vodka—a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy—and you get a picture of the mother I left behind."

- Excerpts from The Life We Bury, by Allen Eskens

Jessica Knoll

"I could decide not to let go. Slip the forged nickel and stainless steel blade (the Shun, decided I liked it better) soundlessly into his stomach. The salesman would probably emit a simple dignified 'Oh!' It was the mother carrying her crusty-nosed baby behind him who was the screamer. You could just tell she was that dangerous combination of bored and dramatic, that she would gleefully, tearfully recount the attack to the news reporters who would later swarm of the scene. I turned the knife over before I could tense, before I could launch, before every muscle in my body, forever on high alert, contracted as if on autopilot."

- Excerpt from Luckiest Girl Alive, by Jessica Knoll