Greg

“I hated the slap on the back, the favors for friends, the internecine feuds and fumed oak skulduggery.”
― Annie Proulx, Postcards: A Masterful Literary Fiction Novel of Crime and Redemption in Rural America

“This was the pleasure of a long life: the way some things worked themselves out.”
― Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

“Jim”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“Words are not enough. Not mine, cut off at the throat before they breathe. Never forming, broken and swallowed, tossed into the void before they are heard. It would be easy to follow, fall to my knees, prostrate before the deli counter. Sweep the shelves clear, scatter the tins, pound the cakes to powder. Supermarket isles stretching out in macabre displays. Christmas madness, sad songs and mistletoe, packed car parks, rotten leaves banked up in corners. Forgotten reminders of summer before the storm. Never trust a promise, they take prisoners and wishes never come true. Fairy stories can have grim endings and I don’t know how I will face the world without you.”
― Peter B. Forster, More Than Love, A Husband's Tale