Carrie

“How could you be this far along in life and still so unsettled? How could you know so much and still be this baffled by it all? Was this what enlightenment felt like, an understanding that life is a cancer that metastasizes so slowly you only have a vague and intermittent sense of your dying? That the dying is happening slowly enough that you get used to it? Or maybe that wasn’t life. Maybe that was just middle age.”
― Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleishman Is in Trouble

“But in fact I was like Ossie, in this one regard: I was consumed by a helpless, often furious love for a ghost. Every rock on the island, every swaying tree branch or dirty dish in our house was like a word in a a sentence that I could read about my mother. All objects and events on our island, every single thing that you could see with your eyes, were like clues that I could use to reinvent her: would our mom love this thing, would she hate it? For a second I luxuriated in a real hatred of my brother.”
― Karen Russell, Swamplandia!

“He chose a Lessian costume- jeans and a cowboy shirt, only slightly wrong- and made his way south along the hillside, toward the house.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Less

“(That girl on the news never invited that man to touch her. All I can think about is how I wish she had had something savage coursing through her skin. God should have made girls lethal when he made monsters of men.)”
― Elisabeth Hewer, Wishing for Birds