vile bodies

“But she had no memory of how to be brave. Here, it seemed, she had no memories at all. Nothing triggered them. And once in a while, when shegave voice to the fleeting edge of one, it seemed like something she was making up.”

- Lorrie Moore, Community Life

“We are doing what the dinosaurs did before us, only faster. We bring strangers together to make strange bedfellows, and we remake the beds they lie in, all at once.”

- Jonathan Weiner, Beak of the Finch

“This is our island. It’s a good island. Until the grown-ups come to fetch us we’ll have fun.”

- William Golding, Lord of the Flies

“There was no innocence more dangerous than the innocence of age.”

- Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, seas- a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-uup nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world- no flower or stone- as a single hello from a human being.”

- Lorrie Moore, Which Is More Than I Can Say About Some People

“An atmosphere of lies like that infects and poisons the whole life of a home. In a house like that, every breath that the children take is filled with the germs of evil.”

- Henrik Isben, A Doll’s House

“There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten — before the end is told — even if there happens to be any end to it.”

- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

“A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.”

- Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

“It’s amazing how a story can be told in two such different ways.”

- August Strindberg, The Ghost Sonata

“There was no solution, but that universal solution which life gives to all questions, even the most complex and insoluble. That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day—that is, forget oneself.”

- Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina