Aitch

“I can't imagine how they must have felt, coming up here in their car and hoping against hope that when they got to the morgue, it would turn out to be someone else's well-loved child.”
― Stephen King, Joyland

“Henry: How does it feel? How does it feel?

Sometimes it feels as though your attention has wandered for just an instant. Then, with a start, you realize that the book you were holding, the red plaid cotton shirt with white buttons, the favorite black jeans and the maroon socks with an almost-hole in one heel, the living room, the about-to-whistle tea kettle in the kitchen: all of these have vanished. You are standing, naked as a jaybird, up to your ankles in ice water in a ditch along an unidentified rural route. You wait a minute to see if maybe you will just snap right back to your book, your apartment, et cetera. After about five minutes of swearing and shivering and hoping to hell you can just disappear, you start walking in any direction, which will eventually yield a farmhouse, where you have the option of stealing or explaining. Stealing will sometimes land you in jail, but explaining is more tedious and time consuming and involves lying anyway, and also sometimes results in being hauled off to jail, so what the hell.”
― Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife

“When I get to the church, I turn around and walk back, striding purposefully towards home, a woman with things to do, somewhere to go. Normal. I watch the people I pass – the two men running, backpacks on, training for the marathon, the young woman in a black skirt and white trainers, heels in her bag, on her way to work – and I wonder what they’re hiding. Are they moving to stop drinking, running to stand still? Are they thinking about the killer they met yesterday, the one they’re planning to see again?

I’m not normal.”
― Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train

“The day was hot and windless and the sky a hard china blue and I lay alone on the railroad bridge and cried my heart out above a river that seemed to have none.”
― William Kent Krueger, Ordinary Grace