"...most art mistakes itself for the universal when it is momentary"
— Sarah Emily Miano (Encyclopaedia Of Snow)

"...I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold. "
— Diane Arbus

"Ice vs. fire; free choice vs. necessity; weight vs. lightness; emptiness vs. meaning...speaking of emptiness, there was a time today when my whole body felt completely devoid of life and utterly without meaning. A character in one of Edith Wharton's novels says that "the real loneliness comes from all these kind faces who only ask one to pretend..." That is how I felt today, waiting anxiously for my afternoon pick-up, only to be let down, and later, facing the world (as if everything was okay inside). "
— Sarah Emily Miano (Encyclopaedia Of Snow)

"There was nothing in this world that was not a con, suddenly I understood this. Nothing really mattered, and nothing could be lost. "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing."
— John Steinbeck (Cannery Row)

"What a terrible mistake to let go of something wonderful for something real. "
— Miranda July (No One Belongs Here More Than You: Stories)

"...no matter how beneficial a disappearing act might be for me, I could never tear myself away from a show in progress. Even when the plot's tragic ending is apparent to the entire audience. Perhaps there's a deus ex machina that will lower from the ceiling and turn the whole debacle into a romantic comedy. never can tell. Paid the full ticket price, might as well stay."
— Josh Kilmer-Purcell (I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir)

"My biggest fault is that the faults I was born with grow bigger each year. It's like I was raising chickens inside me. The chickens lay eggs and the eggs hatch into other chickens, which then lay eggs. Is this any way to live a life? What with all these faults I've got going, I have to wonder. Sure, I get by. But in the end, that's not the question, is it? "
— Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase)

"And sometimes the show can't go on."
— Josh Kilmer-Purcell (I Am Not Myself These Days: A Memoir)

"One of these days they'll be making a film where the whole human race gets wiped out in a nuclear war, but everything works out in the end. "
— Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase)

"I am paving hell with energy... I am laying down good intentions which I believe durable as flint."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"Generally, people who are good at writing letters have no need to write letters. They've got plenty of life to lead inside their own context."
— Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase)

"Judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate."
— Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng: A Novel)

"...mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up. "
— Haruki Murakami (A Wild Sheep Chase)

"I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that."
— Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng: A Novel)

"And I am in retirement from love. "
— William H. Gass (In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & Other Stories)

"People pretend things didn't happen. Or so what, they happened, it's okay. Well, it's never okay. It's always ruined."
— Vendela Vida (Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name: A Novel)

"Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love? "
— Rick Moody (Demonology: Stories)

"I have come to love you in spite of---" "Do I want to be loved in spite of?...Does anyone?"
— Darin Strauss (Chang and Eng: A Novel)

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it."
— Flannery O'Connor

"He loved her because it was his nature to do so, but there were times when he could not endure her love for him. There were times when it became nothing but pure idiot mystery..."
— Flannery O'Connor (Everything That Rises Must Converge)

"(Such a life)engaged gross quantities of hope and despair and set them wildly side by side, like a Third World country of the heart. "
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"Every arrangement in life carried with it the sadness, the sentimental shadow, of its not being something else, but only itself. "
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

"She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust...his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at...She had become him: she longed for these women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up. A rapist. She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car."
— Lorrie Moore (Birds of America: Stories)

""The thing to remember about love affairs," says Simone, "is that they are all like having raccoons in your chimney."
...

"We have raccoons sometimes in our chimney," explains Simone.
"And once we tried to smoke them out. We lit a fire, knowing they were there, but we hoped the smoke would cause them to scurry out the top and never come back. Instead, they caught on fire and came crashing down into our living room, all charred and in flames and running madly around until they dropped dead." Simone swallows some wine. "Love affairs are like that," she says. "They are all like that.""
— Lorrie Moore

"Love drains you, takes with it much of your blood sugar and water weight. You are like a house slowly losing its electricity, the fans slowing, the lights dimming and flickering; the clocks stop and go and stop."
— Lorrie Moore (Self-Help: Stories)

"It is like having a book out from the library.
It is like constantly having a book out from the library."
— Lorrie Moore (Self-Help: Stories)

"This is what happened in love. One of you cried a lot and then both of you grew sarcastic."
— Lorrie Moore (Like Life)

"In my experience, whatever happens clings to us like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing us slightly, both uglifying and giving us texture. You can scrape all you want, you can, if you have money, hire someone else to scrape, but the barnacles will come back or at least leave a blemish on the steel."
— Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City: A Memoir)

"The woman doesn't look up. It's as if she's deaf. Maybe she is. Maybe she's like the Cambodian women I've read about, the ones who witnessed so many atrocities that they have willed themselves blind. Maybe that's what you have to do sometimes to survive. You kill off part of yourself, your hearing or eyesight, your capacity for hope. "
— Ron Rash (Chemistry and Other Stories)

"This is love, to sit with someone you've known forever in a place you've been meaning to go, and watching as their life happens to them until you stand up and it's time to go."
— Daniel Handler (Adverbs: A Novel)

"How do you forget something? You just walk away from it, those who are still alive. There are so few clearings in our hearts and minds, so few places where something can't grow on top of whatever happened to us before, and this is love too. "
— Daniel Handler (Adverbs: A Novel)

"Someone can break your heart, leave you dead on the lawn, and still you never learn what to say to stop it all over again. "
— Daniel Handler (Adverbs: A Novel)

"I count too heavily on birthdays, though I know I shouldn't. Inevitably I begin to assess my life by them, figure out how I'm doing by how many people remember; it's like the old fantasy of attending your own funeral: You get to see who your friends are, get to see who shows up. "
— Lorrie Moore (Anagrams)

"I would never understand photography, the sneaky, murderous taxidermy of it. "
— Lorrie Moore (Anagrams)

"If you're looking for sympathy you'll find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary."
— David Sedaris (Barrel Fever: Stories and Essays)

"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
— George Eliot

"What I've learned is that there is nothing in this life that does not fail to disappoint us, even our own deaths."
— Joe Meno (The Boy Detective Fails)

"The most important things in your life are almost always impossible to predict."
— Joe Meno (The Boy Detective Fails)

"...it occurred to me what a simple thing reality is, how easy it is to make it work. It's just reality. Just housework. Just a home. Like running a simple machine. Once you learn to run it, it's just a matter of repetition. You push this button and pull that lever. You adjust a gauge, put on the lid, set the timer. The same thing, over and over."
— Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes: Stories)

"But who can say what's best? That's why you need to grab whatever chance you have of happiness where you find it, and not worry about other people too much. My experience tells me that we get no more than two or three such chances in a life time, and if we let them go, we regret it for the rest of our lives."
— Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood)

"Men don't get knocked out, or I mean they can fight back against big things. What kills them is erosion; they get nudged into failure. They get slowly scared.[...]It's slow. It rots out your guts."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"There's an awful lot of inactive kindness which is nothing but laziness, not wanting any trouble, confusion, or effort."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"When two people meet, each one is changed by the other so you've got two new people."
— John Steinbeck

"I shall revenge myself in the cruelest way you can imagine. I shall forget it."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"What a frightening thing is the human, a mass of gauges and dials and registers, and we can only read a few and those perhaps not accurately."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"I hate cameras. They are so much more sure than I am about everything."
— John Steinbeck

"There's something desirable about anything you're used to as opposed to something you're not."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"...intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over..."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)

"Nobody changes. Nobody gets hurt."
— John Steinbeck (The Winter of Our Discontent)