Emma

“The flayed landscape of the western prairie does little to remind the people who live there of the covenant of works or the covenant or grace. The sky, visible right down to the horizon, has a diminishing effect upon everything in the foreground, and the distance is as featureless and remote as the possibility of punishment for slander. The roads run straight, with death and old age intersecting at right angles, and the harvest is stored in cemeteries.”
― William Maxwell, Time Will Darken It

“What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that I read your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements of Walt Whitman with a respectful attention due to so much earnestness; and when I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretched myself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at the water's edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was a little wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercups together; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for I do assure you I thought I heard them laugh.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

“It's God's nature to come on in the bottom of the ninth, Tom had told her.”
― Stephen King, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon

“You forget what it was like. You'd swear on your life you never will, but year by year it falls away. How your temperature ran off the mercury, your heart galloped flat-out and never needed to rest, everything was pitched on the edge of shattering glass. How wanting something was like dying of thirst. How your skin was too fine to keep out any of the million things flooding by; every color boiled bright enough to scald you, any second of any day could send you soaring or rip you to bloody shreds.”
― Tana French, The Secret Place