David N

“yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it’s possible to play it with a kind of joy?”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“The gentlemen among my readers will smile to themselves and say that women never did understand business, but the ladies may agree with me that Mrs Brandy understood her business very well, for the chief business of Mrs Brandy’s life was to make Stephen Black as much in love with her as she was with him. In”
― Susanna Clarke, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

“Men tell stories,” I say. It is the truest, simplest answer to his question. “Women get on with it.”
― Kristin Hannah, The Nightingale

“In the aftermath of an athletic humiliation on an unprecedented scale—a loss to a tortoise in a footrace so staggering that, his tormenters teased, it would not only live on in the record books, but would transcend sport itself, and be taught to children around the world in textbooks and bedtime stories for centuries; that hundreds of years from now, children who had never heard of a “tortoise” would learn that it was basically a fancy type of turtle from hearing about this very race—the hare retreated, understandably, into a substantial period of depression and self-doubt.”
― B.J. Novak, One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories