Sandra

“Oh, the pathos of it! - haggard, drawn into fixed lines of unutterable sadness, with a look of loneliness, as of a soul whose depth of sorrow and bitterness no human sympathy could ever reach. The impression I carried away was that I had seen, not so much the President of the United States, as the saddest man in the world.”
― George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo

“her voice suddenly gone as if it had snagged on the mist and was carried off into the failing light, leaving the phone dead in my hand, a warm sliver with the screen fading like some luminous shard from outer space which had traveled across stellar distances at great speed to arrive here in my hand where its glow was now losing its heat, gone”
― Mike McCormack, Solar Bones

“They waited until I was asleep, then roused themselves, exhausted as swimmers, grey between the empty trees. Their hair in tufts, open sores where ears used to be, grubs twisting from their chests. The grotesque remains of incomplete lives, the embodied complexities of desires eternally denied.”
― Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

“In a true emergency, there is no place better than a library and no hero more helpful than a librarian - someone who knows where to find exactly the right book for the occasion.”
― Clara Vulliamy, Tiny Tapir Trouble