Ian Hogan

“How many perfect autumns did a person get? Why did I seem always to be in the wrong place, listening to the wrong music?”
― Elif Batuman, Either/Or

“immediately, how any task other than keeping Toby safe, keeping Toby healthy, seemed like a diversion, or an interruption. She understood with some remorse that if one of her childless friends insisted on coming over during bedtime for martinis and conversation, it wouldn’t feel exactly unwelcome, but it would feel a little irrelevant. Like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain but then stopping for tea. She realized that her old friends had not abandoned her, or at least had not done so in any volitional way; it was just that their attention had been seized, their love redirected, the purpose of each day reoriented, unavoidably and involuntarily. She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“Remembering my youth makes me aware that I never really had enough of it, it was over before I was done with it. Whenever I think of Edward, I think of playing catch in a hot street and that wonderful weariness of the arms. I think of leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself and that wonderful certainty and amazement when you know the glove is just where it should be. Oh, I will miss the world!”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“The reader and I thus mingled will constitute something living, that will not be me, because I will be dead, and will not be that person as they were before reading, because my story, added to their mind, will then become part of their thinking.”
― Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men