Adrian Radu

“He looked at his face in the glass. In this half-light, against white tiles, it looked scarcely less ghostly than Orme’s. A memory tweaked the edges of his mind. Another glass, on the top landing at home, a dark, oval mirror framing the face of a small, pale child. Himself. Five years old, perhaps. Now why did he remember that? Birds had been singing, then, too. Sparrows, twittering in the ivy. A day of shouts and banged doors and tears in rooms he was not allowed to enter. The day his father left home. Or the day he died? No, the day he left. Sassoon smiled, amused at the link he’d discovered, and then stopped smiling. He’d joked once or twice to Rivers about his being his father confessor, but only now, faced with this second abandonment, did he realize how completely Rivers had come to take his father’s place.”
― Pat Barker, The Regeneration Trilogy

“Oak raised his head, and wondering what he could do, listlessly surveyed the scene. By the outer margin of the Pit was an oval pond, and over it hung the attenuated skeleton of a chrome-yellow moon which had only a few days to last—the morning star dogging her on the left hand. The pool glittered like a dead man’s eye, and as the world awoke a breeze blew, shaking and elongating the reflection of the moon without breaking it, and turning the image of the star to a phosphoric streak upon the water. All this Oak saw and remembered.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

“The survivors. They’re the ones I can’t stand to look at, although on many occasions, I still fail. I deliberately seek out the colours to keep my mind off them, but now and then, I witness the ones who are left behind, crumbling amongst the jigsaw puzzle of realisation, despair and surprise. They have punctured hearts. They have beaten lungs.”
― Markus Zusak, The Book Thief

“It was a horse-world, that’s what it was. When I think of him sitting beside me up there on the cart I don’t think of scrap metal, brass, copper, lead, cast-iron. I think of Duke. I think of the life of carters and pedlars. I see him lean forward, elbows on knees, after I’ve taken up the reins, and start to look around him as if he hadn’t noticed the world passing by. I see him scratch his neck and reset his cap. I see him light up a snout, dicky chest or no dicky chest, and breathe out the first drag, bottom lip jutting, then rub his chin with the tip of his thumb, cigarette between his fingers, then run the ball of his thumb across his forehead, and I know I do all those things, without helping it, the same gestures, the same motions.”
― Graham Swift, Last Orders