Amanda Longhurst

“Social fissures spread out in all sorts of unanticipated ways. Making snap judgements online about the lives and personalities of people you’d never met had already been a fashionable form of stupidity for quite some time, but now it became an international sport. Fear leaked while people weren’t looking, crept through tiny gaps under doors and puddled. ‘It’s scary out there,’ people said. ‘Stay safe.’ But much of the time it felt like the problem wasn’t out there at all, it was in there, in the screens that everybody carried with them everywhere they went and nobody could stop looking at.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“because they’ve survived the booze, the hashish, the migraines. Not that at all. It’s that they’ve survived everything in life, humiliations and disappointments and heartaches and missed opportunities, bad dads and bad jobs and bad sex and bad drugs, all the trips and mistakes and face-plants of life, to have made it to fifty and to have made it here: to this frosted-cake landscape, these mountains of gold, the little table they can now see sitting on the dune, set with olives and pita and glasses and wine chilling on ice, with the sun waiting more patiently than any camel for their arrival. So, yes. As with almost every sunset, but with this one in particular: shut the fuck up.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“Maybe he misremembered much of what he lived through – timescales, sequences, the maths of it – but as he dipped into it via memory the feelings were refelt just as strongly, if not stronger.”
― Tom Cox, Villager

“The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death—shouldn’t we all wail to the stars?”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less