Drew McCutchen

“I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter's inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.”
― Don DeLillo, Zero K

“It was an unspoken fact that she could leave at any moment with very little pain, whereas he would be devastated. A puddle of rejection. Because he knew nothing like this would ever happen to him again for the rest of his life. He would never again find a woman like Alice, and after she was gone he would return to the life she had revealed to be tedious and barren.”
― Nathan Hill

“Whatever the weather I went out and wandered, and now I wandered with K.; I introduced him to my solitude and he deepened it without disturbance.”
― Garth Greenwell, What Belongs to You

“Joshua looked through the screen and it was as if he saw me clearly with my soapy hands, my wrinkled fingers, my jaw grinding with frustration and self-abasement, and he hated me. Both of us on the cusp of adulthood, and this is how my brother and I understood what it meant to be a woman: working, dour, full of worry. What it meant to be a man: resentful, angry, wanting life to be everything but what it was.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped: A Memoir