Kevin Tang

“In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to know that it was neither a state of grace nor an illusion; he saw it as a human act of becoming, a condition that was invented and modified moment by moment and day by day, by the will and the intelligence and the heart.”
― John Williams, Stoner

“so tenderhearted, so sensitive to life—his same receptors that were open to beauty were as open to suffering.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“You could have made me come home,” I say. “No, I can only try to be the person you want to come home to.”
― Chloé Cooper Jones, Easy Beauty

“Now everything was going to be impossible, but better.”
― Norman Rush, Subtle Bodies