Matt Wright

“What did you bring your host family?'
'Chocolate.'
'Chocolate.' She sighed.
'I'm afraid I'll accidentally eat it all before I get there,' I said, following the rule that you had to pretend to have this problem where you couldn't resist chocolate.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“Light from even a nearby star was four years old by the time it reached your eyes. Where would I be in four years? Simple: where you are. In four years I'll have reached you.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time--the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputable that that was what life was, that its real nature had finally been revealed. But then time passed and unthinkably grew dead again, and it turned out that that fullness had been an aberration and might never come back.”
― Elif Batuman, The Idiot

“This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.”
― Rachel Cusk, Outline