Michelle

“Lisabetta knows the trick to life,” she said, “is knowing what you want.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco

“Doesn’t it gives you hope?’ he says suddenly. ‘Hope?’ ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Isn’t it a relief that there’re things still like that, a real bit of Old England still left, despite all these immigrants coming in?’ I don’t know what to say. His words hang and all the awkwardness is silence.”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“This life would, for no reason, smash its big fist down into this or that face, no apologies. While the rest of the world watched, then moved happily on.”
― George Saunders, Vigil

“She was urging me to share that, but not unprocessed, unfiltered so that it remained in its crude, original form of pain and sorrow, plunked down like a bottle of homemade wine. You must tell it again another time, she had said on our way to Ferrara. Made better, not just for the sake of the listener but for the sake of the teller. To have mastered the story. It is the work of the metallurgist to extract the gold from a clump of earth, and so it was the work of the speaker, I understood at last, to extract and refine, from the admixed events of love and life, the comedy.”
― Andrew Sean Greer, Villa Coco