Susan Ecker

“and know all, in only a moment. “Is it?” his mother says, her face white, stretched. “Is it what?” he says, feeling skittish and a little mad, therefore unable to keep himself from lapsing into verbal sparring. “Yours.” “Is what mine?” he returns, almost gleefully. Mary presses her lips together. “Did you put it there?” “Did I put what where?” At this point he is aware of Agnes turning her head to look at him—he can imagine her dark eyes on him, assessing, gathering information, like a spool gathers thread—but he still can’t stop.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“Marie has a swift vision of herself as a tiny figure, climbing the walls; oh someday she will find her way over the queen’s rampart, someday she will be inside, out of the wind. Eleanor will be a model, then, Marie thinks, for her own purpose on the earth, at this abbey she hates so much. She will build around herself walls of wealth and friends and good clear reputation, she will make her frail sisters safe within. Marie will mold herself in the queen’s form, she thinks.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix

“When she had taken his hand that day, the first time she had met him, she had felt—what? Something of which she had never known the like. Something she would never have expected to find in the hand of a clean-booted grammar-school boy from town. It was far-reaching: this much she knew. It had layers and strata, like a landscape. There were spaces and vacancies, dense patches, underground caves, rises and descents. There wasn’t enough time for her to get a sense of it all—it was too big, too complex. It eluded her, mostly. She knew there was more of it than she could grasp, that it was bigger than both of them. A sense, too, that something was tethering him, holding him back; there was a tie somewhere, a bond, that needed to be loosened or broken, before he could fully inhabit this landscape, before he could take command.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, Hamnet

“And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our ‘progress,’ so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?”
― Lily King, Euphoria