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“I’m getting a library ticket and a cat, Mrs Crowther,’ said Patricia. ‘I’ll not be bored.”
― Catriona McPherson, The Edinburgh Murders

“Thomas wished he had been able to do this as a writer, find a tone or a context that was beyond himself, that was rooted in what shone and glittered and could be seen, but that hovered above the world of fact, entering into a place where spirit and substance could merge and drift apart and merge again.”
― Colm Tóibín, The Magician

“Everywhere you went you heard the water, the same way you had always heard your breathing, and would later hear the highway, or trains, or women’s voices. But the sound was so much a part of everything that you couldn’t hear it at all then. This is what I took for granted: The sound of the water. The light on the water, day or night. The way you could look out for so long you couldn’t tell the difference between the water and the sky. The sand that blew onto the highway in sheets and formed small dunes against the curbs. The smell of the water. The tough grass that grew from nothing.”
― Ann Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars

“It’s been a very long two months. She’d been a lot younger, two months ago. She’d been walking steadily on a plateau, for years, through her sixties into her seventies, but now she’s suddenly taken a step down. That’s what happens. She knows all about it. She’s been warned many times about this downwards step, this lower shelf. It’s not a cliff of fall, but it’s a descent to a new kind of plateau, to a lower level. You hope to stay there on the flat for a few more years, but you may not be so lucky.”
― Margaret Drabble, The Dark Flood Rises