Mohammad Huraiz

“When people say, “She’s a good-looking woman,” they usually mean, “She used to be a good-looking woman.” But when I say that about Margaret, I mean it. She thinks—she knows—that she’s changed, and she has; though less to me than to anybody else. Naturally, I can’t speak for the restaurant manager. But I’d put it like this: she sees only what’s gone, I see only what’s stayed the same. Her hair is no longer halfway down her back or pulled up in a French pleat; nowadays it is cut close to her skull and the grey is allowed to show. Those peasanty frocks she used to wear have given way to cardigans and well-cut trousers. Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still. The same eyes that were in the same head when we first met, slept together, married, honeymooned, joint-mortgaged, shopped, cooked and holidayed, loved one another and had a child together. And were the same when we separated. But”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“The question of accumulation,” Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack—there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure. Adrian”
― Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

“What fun would a murder mystery be if the murderer was plain to see up front? Mystery relies on feeding us options and opportunities for guessing right—and guessing way wrong. A red herring is the literary technique of boldly played misdirection—the origin of the idiom is that, if you wanted to get hounds off your scent, you could use the skin of a red herring to draw their attention, thus drawing them away from their actual target. 5”
― Chuck Wendig, Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

“June 30, 1992 Lunch with Doug. He wants to do POP: The Movie. He thinks he can raise $4 million from the licensees (Konami, etc.), then get the rest the usual way. $20”
― Jordan Mechner, The Making of Prince of Persia