emma m.

“I was pretending that I did not speak their language; on the moon we spoke a soft, liquid tongue, and sang in the starlight, looking down on the dead dried world.”
― Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

“How can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.”
― Ian McEwan, Atonement

“It’s not that you have to achieve anything, it’s that you have to get away from where you are.”
― Marguerite Duras, The Lover

“Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History