Dan Shields

“Coming?" Dennis held his arm out for her, a patient smile in his voice. She peered up at him, but he was just a tall, blurry shadow. There was talk and laughter and music coming from inside the house. Above it the stars were in a black sky. That black, black sky.
"You all right?"
All those stars so far apart. None of them close. From far away they just looked it.”
― Andre Dubus III, Dirty Love

“It is so easy for humans to be cruel, and they leap to it. They love to do it. It is an exercise of all their laughable powers.”
― Jesse Ball, Census

“Listen, if there is a hell, we're in it. And if there's a heaven, we're already there. This is it.”
― Mieko Kawakami, Heaven

“To my mind, it’s one of the deepest gratifications the poet or fiction writer knows. I mean, the internal stumbling upon some satisfactory answer to the question, What is this like? Or, What does this remind me of? A comparison is laboriously but successfully introduced. You meet your metaphor, and it’s good.”
― Brad Leithauser