irene

“He had had a habit throughout the twenty-seven years of making a narrow remark which, like a plumber’s snake, could work its way through the ear down the throat, halfway to my heart. He would then disappear, leaving me choking with equipment. What I mean is, I sat down on the library steps and he went away.”
― Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: Stories

“Not touching but joined in astonishment as two cuts lie parallel in the same flesh.”
― Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse

“If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch