Rick Montealegre

“We musn't forget that our bodies decline, friends die, everyone forgets about us, and the end is solitude,”
― Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog

“On the outside, Oscar simply looked tired, no taller, no fatter, only the skin under his eyes, pouched from years of quiet desperation, had changed. Inside, he was in a world of hurt. He saw black flashes before his eyes. He saw himself falling through the air. He knew what he was turning into. He was turning into the worst kind of human on the planet: an old bitter dork. Saw himself at the Game Room, picking through the miniatures for the rest of his life. He didn't want this future but he couldn't see how it could be avoided, couldn't figure his way out of it.

Fukú.”
― Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

“I was thinking that work is like fertilizer in that I'm glad it exists; I just don't ever want to get stuck in it.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Mistborn: The Final Empire

“His ears were attuned for the steady firing of Couzens' heavy machine guns, which he knew should now commence, and the thud of his carefully sited mortars, but he did not hear them and he realized, suddenly and sickeningly, that the Chinese had not attacked across the spit of land. They were pouring across the ice, and had taken Dog Company in the rear.”
― Pat Frank, Hold Back the Night