LS

“Make up a story... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul.”
― Toni Morrison, The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993

“Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World

“How sad, how strange, we make companions out of air and hurt them, so they will defy us, completing creation.”
― John Updike, Rabbit Redux