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“Your heart's beating so fast,' Johny murmured against his mouth. 'What are you afraid of?'
Eugene bit Johny's lip and tugged, just to feel the stretch of Johny's smile against his skin. He'd told Angelique that he wasn't scared of Johny, but what he'd meant was that he wasn't any more scared of him than he was of anything else. 'Everything.'
'You can be afraid later.”
― Arden Powell, The Bayou

“Yale was busy wondering if this was the governing factor of his life: the fear of getting his heart broken. Or rather, the need to protect the remaining scraps of his heart, the ones torn smaller by every breakup, every failure, every funeral, every day on earth. Was this, why a shrink would say he was with Charlie, out of all the men in Chicago? Yale might break Charlie's heart - he did it almost every day - but Charlie, for all his possessiveness, would never break Yale's.”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers

“It was a hermitage, her glimmering retreat. No people invited, for what could they know of the secrets that crept and chilled and chuckled in the marrow of her bones? No need of people, because she was self-fulfilling, delighted with the pre-eminence of her art, and the future of her knowing hands.
But the pinnacle become an abyss, and the diving joy ended. At last there was a prison.
I am encompassed by a wall, high and hard and stone, with only my brainy nails to tear it down.
And I cannot do it.”
― Keri Hulme, The Bone People

“She was struck by the selfish thought that this was not fair to her. That she'd been in the middle of a different story, one that has nothing to do with this. She was a person who was finding her daughter, making things right with her daughter, and there was no room in that story for the idiocy of extreme religion, the violence of the men she'd never met. Just as she'd been in the middle of a story about divorce when the towers fell in New York City, throwing everyone's careful plans to shit. Just as she'd since been in a story about raising her own brother, growing up with her brother in the city on their own, making it in the world, when the virus and the indifference of greedy men had steamrolled through. She thought of Nora, whose art and love were interrupted by assassination and war. Stupid men and their stupid violence, tearing apart everything good that was ever built. Why couldn't you ever just go after your life without tripping over some idiot's dick?”
― Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers