Heather-Lin

“The biology majors among them would someday come to learn this fact: certain parasites can bend the behavior of their hosts to serve their own purposes. If viruses could do it, here is how it would look: seventeen people crowded into one small room, seventeen pairs of lungs breathing the same air, seventeen mouths drinking from the same two shot glasses, again and again, for hours.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“They hike almost three miles without incident, and it's amazing to watch the colors leach back into the desert after the day's blanching. There's a moment, Lydia realizes, or no, more than a moment - a span of perhaps fifteen minutes just at twilight - when the desert is the most perfect place that exists. The temperature, the light, the colors, all hang and linger at some unflawed precipice, like the cars of a roller coaster ticking ever so slowly over their apex before the crash. The light droops ever farther from the sky, and Lydia can smell the heat of the day wicking away from her skin.”
― Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt

“They died, he wrote, as if overcome by sleep - or, according to a second translation: as if drowned in a dream.”
― Karen Thompson Walker, The Dreamers

“I’m a miserable cynic (a newer development) and a dreamy romantic (always have been), and it’s such a terrible combination that I don’t know how to tolerate myself.”
― Sarah Hogle, You Deserve Each Other