Shawn Alff

“This is why a woman makes things up: Because when she dies, those lives she never got to are all going down with her. All those possibilities will just site there like a bunch of school kids with their hands raised and uncalled on--each knowing, really knowing, the answer.”
― Lorrie Moore, Anagrams

“I guess this is a prayer to the unsettled arc of mortality, the hoist and shuffle of this uncertain moment, our lives like bulbs flaring and going out as the city's seven million souls--ah, but that's another argument--click out their bedside lamps and curl toward whatever approximation of warmth they have found, while the music plays on in the streets below, the neon humming, the ambulances wailing the sudden shocked song of the living.”
― Jon Davis, Preliminary Report

“I tell you this story only to try to explain to you that the world you see today and the world you will see at the upper span of your long lifetimes—well—it will amaze you. The changes you will experience, the chances you will have to shape those changes—I just cannot stress how astonishing and astounding and joyful an opportunity it will be.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“The history had already been written. What is history but an adjudication of memory. And what is memory but a faithless rendering of all sex, death, justice, murder, prayer, greed, hope, mercy, and love. Memory was as molten as the soul.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio