“This would have been her favorite season in the Allegheny woods. The shadows of the trees were rickety, and the wind had sap in its scent. But last week, Ty had left; now one day decayed into the next. Their house was abandoned. Only their father, sitting in the dark.”
—“Practicing,” Chia-Chia Lin

“The driver and I got a late start. I usually decide on these excursions the night before, but it was late in the morning when I informed the friend who was coming to visit me for the weekend that I had to cancel, it was absolutely necessary for me to cancel. I had got it in my head that in her presence some calamity or another would arise and she would have to assist me in some way, rush me to a physician or something. She would be grateful she was there for me perhaps, but I would find it a terrific annoyance and embarrassment. I gave some other excuse for the disinvitation of course. Pipes. I think it was broken pipes. I should have written it down so I don’t use it again.”
—“Flour,” Joy Williams

“‘I wanted to have an exciting week,’ she said, ‘in order to write an essay the class would find interesting. But on Friday my boyfriend was sick, and I was only able to do such interesting things as traveling to the pharmacy and taking his temperature. Then on Saturday I became sick, and did such interesting things as coughing, shaking, and dreaming in a fever. On Sunday we both felt better, and so we did such interesting things as reading, drinking tea, and sweeping the dusty house. I was worried. I asked my boyfriend if my life was a little boring. My boyfriend is a serious person. He thought for a long time. He told me that everyone’s life is a little boring, if you write it down.’”
—“The Intermediate Class,” Sam Allingham

Love
There are flowers hanging in the vine
so high you cannot see

Now my mind
must go on holiday
torn from its hook
a broken valentine

I see smoke
from a revolver
will I get hit
I hardly care

When I’m bombed
I stretch like bubblegum
and look too long
straight at the morning sun

Love
There are flowers along the avenue
all things perfectly in place

I build a shrine
I set a monument
because you’re fire
because you’re a fire escape

—Lanegan

“It is usual that the moment you write for publication—I mean one of course—one stiffens in exactly the same way one does when one is being photographed. The simplest way to overcome this is to write it to someone, like me. Write it as a letter aimed at one person. This removes the vague terror of addressing the large and faceless audience and it also, you will find, will give a sense of freedom and a lack of self-consciousness.”
—Steinbeck

Still, my mother-in-law said, ‘Wuji is just as successful as the other sons! He got his Ph.D. in America! And at least he is not a volleyball coach, right?’

‘Wuji jumps like an elephant,’ my father-in-law said. ‘He is so slow he has to wave the flies away; he cannot swat them. I do not think he could have become a volleyball coach.’

If Wuji was not the ump in the family, maybe he would feel bad, But, instead, he calmly said, ‘I am not a coach and I am not a professor. I cannot jump and truly, I am slow. But I am going to be a father.’

And my father-in-law agreed then that Wuji had accomplished at least one important thing. Because a child born in America is a U.S. citizen. And a U.S. citizen can do anything!

‘He is a success!’ my mother-in-law said.

My father-in-law nodded.
—“No More Maybe,” Gish Jen

 “There was defiance on her face that warred with curiosity and some other emotion. Her lips were chapped. In this, her natural environment, she seemed so sure of herself that he felt awkward, ungainly. Something had clicked into place. Something had sharpened her, and he thought it might be memory.”
—Jeff Vandermeer, Authority

“For several minutes, Jayne and I sit up in bed in the darkness and the quiet. We don’t hear anything. Actually, that’s incorrect: we don’t hear anything untoward. You always hear something if you listen hard enough. The susurration of the ceiling fan. The faint roar of the comforter.”
—“The Poltroon Husband,” Joseph O’Neill

“Mama’s hands stroked my hair back off my face, cupped my head, held me safe. I pressed my face into her neck, and let it all go. The grief. The anger. The guilt and the shame. It would come back later. It would come back forever. We had all wanted the simplest thing, to love and be loved and be safe together, but we had lost it and I didn’t know how to get it back.”
—Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“My stories were full of boys and girls gruesomely raped and murdered, babies cooked in pots of boiling beans, vampires and soldiers and long razor-sharp knives. Witches cut off the heads of children and grown-ups. Gangs of women rode in on motorcycles and set fire to people’s houses. The ground opened and green-black lizard tongues shot up to pull people down. I got to be very popular as a baby-sitter; everyone was quiet and well-behaved when I told stories, their eyes fixed on my face in a way that made me feel like one of my own witches casting a spell.”
—Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina

“Crazy things were always happening to Romi: her life was swept along by an endless series of coincidences and mystical signs. She was an actress but not a performer, the difference being that at heart she believed that nothing was real, that everything was a kind of game, but her belief in this was sincere, deep, and true, and her feeling for life was enormous. In other words, she didn’t live to convince others of anything. The crazy things that happened to her happened because she opened herself to them and sought them out, because she was always trying something without being too invested in the outcome, only in the feeling it provoked and her ability to rise to it. In her films she was only ever herself, a self stretched this way or that by the circumstances of the script. In the year that we had been friends, I had never known her to lie.”
—“Seeing Ershadi,” Nicole Krauss