“Everything that was exposed, in the end I was clay and she was the sculptor, I thought, it’s a shame that we have to live, but it’s a tragedy that we get to live only one life, because if I’d had two lives, I would have spent one of them with her”

— Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“This isn’t about winning, and in the end it isn’t about Kylee’s betrayal; it’s about finally fighting back. I wasn’t going to do it wrong again. I’d use my best tools and talents. I loved being onstage, but I was tired of acting the part of victim. I’m tired of everything and everyone pounding on me. I’m hurting worse than any person could hurt, I’m going to exploit it. I’m no nail, so screw them all.”

— Patrick Jones, Nailed

“…And so time flowed on through the darkness, deprived of advancing watch hands: time undivided and unmeasured. Once it lost its points of demarcation, time ceased being a continuous line and became instead a kind of formless fluid that expanded or contracted at will.”

— Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

“ If Anna was right, if a person was no more than a collection of habits, perhaps the habits were maintained only so as not to disappoint the lover that one slept beside each night. But what chance did that leave for becoming, one fine day, a wholly different being? Maybe it was he, after all, who had not been able to abide being accounted for, who had no longer wanted to be reached. Once there was a woman he loved. That was how it had begun. But from there the story might have unfolded any number of ways. Only the end was always the same: he had emptied himself of the ballast of memory and lunged weightless into the future. Alone and astonished, attempting to take with him not even a trace. In the end he had betrayed the woman he loved, and who was there who would not judge him for that? Anna, backward or forward, the name a ghost of itself. It he called her, if he could reach her now, what would there be to say? ”

— Nicole Krauss, Man Walks Into a Room

“If I were as rich as Mr. Darcy,’ cried a young Lucas who came with his sisters, ‘I should not care how proud I was. I would keep a pack of foxhounds, and drink a bottle of wine every day.”

— Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen

“It was wrong — she’d go to Hell and have to spend eternity in a yellow room.”

—The Accidental Human, Dakota Cassidy

“Perhaps she involuntarily held out her hands in a gesture of compassion as she spoke. At any rate, I had caught them in my own and was clinging to them with an impulse as instinctive as that which prompts the drowning man to seize upon and cling to the rope which is thrown to him as he sinks for the last time. As I looked up into her compassionate face and her eyes moist with pity, my brain ceased to whirl. The tender human sympathy which thrilled in the soft pressure of her fingers, had brought me the support I needed. Its effect to calm and soothe was like that of some wonder-working elixer.”

- Edward Bellany, Looking Backward