Category: writing

There are two kinds of people in this world: people who want to be desired, and people who want to be desired so much that they pretend they don’t. Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman.

But she’s turned her face away and she’s crying. She’s not crying for him, because nobody, he thinks, will ever cry for him. God didn’t cut him out that way. She’s crying for her idea of what life should be like: Sunday after church, all the sisters, sisters-in-law, wives kissing and patting, swatting at each […]

My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another. Rabih Alameddine, An Unnecessary Woman.

I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem more real. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.

All the things she read in Raymond Chandler’s books about being hit, he’d never mentioned how heavy it felt. Pete Dexter, Paris Trout. 

His face hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression […]

I see no possible reasons for it. Is it so Mariette Baptiste will be praised and esteemed by the pious? Or is it so she shall be humiliated and jeered at by skeptics? Is it to honor religion or to humble science? And what are these horrible wounds, really? A trick of anatomy, a bleeding […]

That spring Jenny’s mother was expecting a baby, there was no rain worth remembering, the grass, the sun and the birds lost their self-centred winter mood and began to think of others. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Cold and calm under mackerel skies that pink in the sunset. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy.