Jenny

“He lifted one tentative hand to cradle her face and watched her eyes darken. Another hand turned her, lifted her face to bestow the gentlest of kisses. As her hands lifted to frame his face, tracing the rough stubble she found there, she felt his momentary shock and it made her reckless. Her fingers arrowed into his black hair to pull him closer, urging him to go on. There was a battle waging inside him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he felt the desperation in the kiss, could still taste the salty tears on her skin.”
― L.J. Ross, Holy Island

“She had used all the tricks in the book to encourage him, to convince him, to cajole him into looking after himself. But it turned out that, all along, the only real motivation he needed to change was to start having sex with her mum. You have to be so careful what you wish for.”
― Richard Osman, The Man Who Died Twice

“Each twisted preference designed to destabilise my sense of identity, to shape me into the wife he wanted me to be: compliant and isolated, uncertain and dependent. A wife who mirrored his interests, as though he were Pygmalion and I Galatea, carved from ivory, every sweep of my desires a product of his creation. A woman who didn’t dare leave the house for too long in case I missed his calls: those regular daily interactions designed to keep me at home, entirely reliant on him.”
― Hannah Beckerman, The Forgetting

“When you investigate a crime in real time, on air, you have this problem of reverb. The reporting you do today will influence the interviews and responses you get tomorrow, because your subject will have heard your episode, and will know your doubts, and suspicions, and theories, and thoughts. They will know what others have told you. And it will influence what they in turn tell you. That’s fine for fiction, but it’s a serious problem from a journalistic standpoint, the telling of a story influencing the story as it’s unfolding. It’s bait and switch. It’s unfair to the listener. You have your footprints and fingerprints all over the story in a very postmodern way. The risk with that—the reason news organizations don’t do it—is that you’ll find inconsistencies. You’ll find people lied to you. You’ll find you overlooked a piece of information, and you may have to reassess or revamp your story. I’m not saying it’s unethical per se, just that there are these potential pitfalls.—Mark Pattinson, journalism professor, on the ethics of true crime podcasting”
― Loreth Anne White, Beneath Devil's Bridge