morri

“She felt strange. For a moment it seemed to her that the day was already over--she was in bed, asleep, and then it was the next day and now here she was again. 'Oh,' she said.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“As she mader the long journey home to Champion Hill she felt what she had tried and failed to feel the day before: she looked at the city and was sick with love for it, sick with yearning to remain a part of it, to remain alive and young and unconfined and bursting with sensation. Her tired muscles began to ache, but even the ache was dear to her, even the blisters on her heels. She'd be a thing of aches and blisters for the rest of her days, she thought; she'd ask for nothing, trouble no one; if only they'd let her keep her freedom, if only they'd let her keep her life.”
― Sarah Waters, The Paying Guests

“Everyone stared...at their own hands, or else abstractedly at the wall, as there had become in the room a feeling of immobilization, something of both nostalgia and doom--a sort of gigantic helplessness...an unpleasant urge to stay still for a very long time, forever, perhaps, not saying or thinking anything, but just accepting one another, entering and absorbing and maybe, finally, somehow--with anonymity, osmosis, conjecture, and luck--then, experiencing one another.”
― Tao Lin, Bed

“He walked out into the night, thinking languageless thoughts...He ran suddenly across a street. At night, he knew, there could be the belief that something never before felt might be felt, something new. You could allow yourself quite easily this view of the world--this thrilling, midnightly faith--of there being something out there that loved you, that, at night, worshipped and searched for you, like a past life seeking its next, wanting desperately the continuation of itself. And though it would probably never find you, it would also, you believed at night, never give up, and this was enough--that something was out there and desperate and on its way.”
― Tao Lin, Bed