Rachel B

“We remained travelers, enclosed in the self, capable, possibly, of transforming ourselves in contact with alterity, but certainly not of experiencing it profoundly. We are spies, we make the rapid, furtive contact of spies. When”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“In most novels it is taken for granted that people over fifty are as set in their ways as elderly apple trees, and as permanently shaped and scarred by the years they have weathered. The literary convention is that nothing major can happen to them except through subtraction.”
― Alison Lurie, Foreign Affairs

“It was like a flash of lightning amidst the dark of night, when for some reason you suddenly see an extraordinary multitude of things at once: the bed canopy, the folding screen, the window, the canary fluttering on its perch, and a glass with a silver spoon in it and spots of magnesium on its handle. It is probably the quality of fear to have big eyes.”
― Nikolai Leskov, The Enchanted Wanderer: and Other Stories

“Part of jazz is the illusion of spontaneity and Monk played the piano as though he’d never seen one before.”
― Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book about Jazz