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“In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“A child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Fire and water looked so lovely together. It was a pity they destroyed each other by nature.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“And you used to make art and like boys and talk to horses and pull the moon through the window for my birthday present.”
― Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun

“When you feel homesick,’ he said, ‘just look up. Because the moon is the same wherever you go.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Some mornings, she’d wake and vow, Today, I will get it right. I won’t be such an awful mess of a girl. I won’t lose my temper or make unkind remarks. I won’t go too far with a joke and feel the room go quiet with disapproval. I’ll be good and kind and sensible and patient. The sort everyone loves. But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled. She’d say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly. She’d take a dare she shouldn’t, just to be noticed. Perhaps Mabel was right, and she was selfish. But what was the point of living so quietly you made no noise at all? “Oh, Evie, you’re too much,” people said, and it wasn’t complimentary. Yes, she was too much. She felt like too much inside all the time. So why wasn’t she ever enough?”
― Libba Bray, The Diviners

“Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have backaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“But sometimes, unexpectedly, grief pounded over me in waves that left me gasping; and when the waves washed back, I found myself looking out over a brackish wreck which was illumined in a light so lucid, so heartsick and empty, that I could hardly remember that the world had ever been anything but dead.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History

“I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“He is half of my soul, as the poets say.”
― Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles

“She’s the only divine thing he’s ever believed in. The only creature in this vast, cruel land who could kill him. And sometimes, in his loveliest dreams, he imagines she does.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“He loves her.
Of this he’s certain.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“In all of his worst nightmares, she’s dying. She’s fading away in his arms, helpless and whimpering, while hot, dark blood spills over his fingers.
This, he tells her.
He doesn’t tell her that his hand holds the blade.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Drowning Faith

“I feel like the word shatter.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I’d turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale

“Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God