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“I saw that I was still a boy. There were men stronger, and women too. There were men wiser, and women too. There were men quicker, and women too. There was always someone or some two or some three who will grab me like a stick and break me, grab me like wet cloth, and wring everything out of me. And that was just the way of the world. That was the way of everybody’s world. I who thought he had his hatchets and his cunning, will one day be grabbed and tossed and thrown in with shit, and beaten and destroyed. I am the one who will need saving, and it’s not that someone will come and save me, or that nobody will, but that I will need saving, and walking forth in the world in the shape and step of a man meant nothing.”

— Marlon James, Black Leopard, Red Wolf

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All winter long, I had glimpsed his deeply set habits, his regimented schedule. When I left, he would eat a dinner of leftovers, then continue to work until sleep. Everything revolved, to a fault, around work, around his next book project. If I had lived alone, I would have turned out the same way. It is the thing I have been most afraid of happening, my strictness toward myself calcifying into a lifestyle, my traits ingrown so deeply that my oddness surfaces, apparent to all.

Ling Ma, Bliss Montage

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“Yes, well, life is a folly. If you live long enough, nothing is surprising.”

— Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring

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Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

Colson Whitehead, Zone One

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“In painting as in writing I try to see strictly in the moment in which I see — and not to see through the memory of having seen in a past instant. The instant is this one. The instant is of an imminence that takes my breath away. The instant is in itself imminent. At the same time that I live it, I burst into its passage into another instant.”

— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

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I am a good student and have been unable to prevent myself from learning his taste very thoroughly, to the extent that I have come to know what he wants before he even wants it himself, and in the matter of women I have become positively prophetic, almost to the extent that I see them with his eyes and feel his own desire for them.

Rachel Cusk, Outline

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“Deep in each man is the knowledge that something knows of his existence. Something knows, and cannot be fled nor hid from.”

— Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing

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I had not known, before us, that every vein in my body was capable of carrying light, like a river seen from a train makes a channel of sky etch itself deep into a landscape. I had not really known I could be so much more than myself. I had not known another body could do this to mine.

Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy

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“Hatred is a leech: The thing that sticks to a person’s skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one’s spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them.”

— Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

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Some things in this world just ain’t meant to be, not in the times we want ’em to, and the heart has to hold it in this world as a remembrance, a promise for the world that’s to come.

James McBride, The Good Lord Bird

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“My attraction had been immediate and profound. And it had nothing to do with the way he looked. My attraction was to what resided between his lines.”

— Augusten Burroughs, You Better Not Cry

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My conclusion is that when it comes to the face, emotions are seventy per cent from the eyebrows and thirty per cent from the mouth.

Mieko Kawakami, Ms Ice Sandwich

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“Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”

— Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions

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Prayers to God were rarely answered, while shouts into cyberspace always receive a response, even if misspelled and hateful.

Dave Eggers, The Every

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“Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.”

— Don DeLillo, Zero K

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None of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.

Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing

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“We often need to lose sight of our priorities in order to see them.”

— John Irving, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed