Stratton Murphy

“[O]ne of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened before.”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

“The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.”
― J.A. Baker, The Peregrine

“Maybe there would be a bad outcome for some of the others, but no one was going to shoot a soprano.”
― Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

“The love of literature, of language, of the mystery of the mind and heart showing themselves in the minute, strange, and unexpected combinations of letters and words, in the blackest and coldest print—the love which he had hidden as if it were illicit and dangerous, he began to display, tentatively at first, and then boldly, and then proudly.”
― John Williams, Stoner