Brian Pappas

“The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.

'It's been fun,' she said.

'Yes,' I said, taking her hand.

She was wearing gloves.”
― T. C. Boyle

“I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little further down our particular path than we have yet gone ourselves.”
― E.M. Forster

“Writing is a habit, an addiction, as powerful and overmastering an urge as putting a bottle to your lips or a spike in your arm. Call it the impulse to make something out of nothing, call it an obsessive-compulsive disorder, call it logorrhea. Have you been in a bookstore lately? Have you seen what these authors are doing, the mountainous piles of the flakes of themselves they're leaving behind, like the neatly labeled jars of shit, piss, and toenail clippings one of John Barth's characters bequeathed to his wife, the ultimate expression of his deepest self?”
― T.C. Boyle

“Perhaps it is better to wake up after all, even to suffer, rather than to remain a dupe to illusions all one's life.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening, and Selected Stories