underthepile

[underthepile]

“When would her sense that she was wise be corroborated by her environment?”

— Lillian Fishman, “Travesty” in The New Yorker, 19 May 2025

[underthepile]

“The best thing / about my mother’s apple pie: / she was here to make it.”

— Bob Hicok, “The Eulogy I Didn’t Give (XXXVII)” in The New Yorker, 7 July 2025

[underthepile]

“A farewell can be a mercy after two people have met at the height of stark understanding.”

Yiyun Li, “Any Human Heart” from The New Yorker, 23 June 2025

[underthepile]

I used to seek lift from the overwhelm in drink.

I'd ride over the meadow of doubt flowers

To the field of miracles where anything was possible

In the blur.

………………………………………………………

How ridiculous now to think we were happy in the quick shelter

We sought from truth.

I now understand how a whole country can drink

From the waters of illusion and go down.

And how easy fury can turn to gunshots

Then give way to torpor

— Joy Harjo, “Overwhelm” in The New Yorker

[underthepile]

“But perhaps what felt impossible was leaving that person behind. When your love for a person is so profound that it’s part of who you are, then the absence of the person becomes part of your DNA, your bones, and your skin. Charlie and Sylvie’s deaths were now part of Julia’s topography. The losses ran like a river inside her.”

— Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful

[underthepile]

“so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it” (7).

[underthepile]

“Most of the time she followed the fisherman around, but they hardly ever spoke to one another. They merely tolerated each other, slightly amused and mutually independent. They didn't bother to try to understand one another or to make any impression on one another; that is also a way of enjoying oneself.”

— Tove Jansson, Moominpappa at Sea

[underthepile]

“This is the world we live in. We are not heroes. We do not choose to be great; we have no power over our destinies. The scraps of freedom that we have are to pick between two poisons, to make the least bad decision we can, knowing that there is no outcome that will not leave us bruised, bloody on the floor. You have no choice. Your choices have been taken from you.”

— Claire North, Ithaca

[underthepile]

When you married someone, you promised to love every person he would be. He promised to love every person she had been.

—Brit Bennett, The Vanishing Half

[underthepile]

“The silence of men is a novel experience, and she is prepared to thoroughly enjoy it.”

— Claire North, Ithaca

[underthepile]

“Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.”

—Sally Rooney, Intermezzo

[underthepile]

“And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?”

— Sally Rooney, Intermezzo, p. 49

[underthepile]

“God, I hate my family, these people I never chose to love, but love all the same.”

—Anne Enright, The Gathering

[underthepile]

“She had the gift of feet, that placed themselves one after the other so that she could walk out of there, and she had the gift of her hands, to make her way through life, and she did not look back.”

—Anne Enright, The Gathering

[underthepile]

“When he is gone, I go upstairs and lie down on Emily's bed. Then I get up and pull the duvet back and lie down again. I do not know what she smells like, she is like a perfume you have been wearing too long, she is still too close to the inside of me. So I can not smell her, quite, but I know that her smell is there as I lie down with the thought of her beside me. I want to run my hand down her exquisite back, and over her lovely little bum. I want to check that it is all still there, and nicely packed, and happy, that my daughter's muscles agree with her bones. I want to find the person that I built from my body's own stuff, and grew on ten thousand plates of organic sausages and sugar-free beans, and I want to squeeze every part of her tight, until she is moulded and compact. I want to finish the job of making her, because when she is fully made she will be strong.”

—Anne Enright, The Gathering

[underthepile]

“There is a hint of my brother’s smile in my own mirror, a tone of voice I sometimes hit. I do not think we remember our family in any real sense. We live in them, instead.”

[underthepile]

“Up ahead, Anna weaves through the clustered families, earning curious stares and Mei notes that the entire throng is white. This is the truth in the model minority myth: the mathematics every Asian American excels at. The risk-assessment practice of counting other people of color in a crowd.”

— Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, Off the Books