Riley

“If you don't believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying "Country Roads," try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to "West Virginia, mountain mama," you're going to be singing along, and by the time he's done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who's been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.”
― Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown

“They even talked about limbo, where they said unbaptized infants and upstanding non-Catholics went, so I always pictured Abraham Lincoln floating around with babies in limbo.”
― John "Chick" Donohue, The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War

“If someone changes so much that they're barely the same person, who are you even missing?”
― Allison Larkin, The People We Keep

“James J. Strang, innocent target of religious persecution—like all his personae, this one proved to be a mask. Yet it was exactly those masks—those endless layers of ambiguity—that gave the man his charisma,”
― Miles Harvey, The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontier Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch