“A man must shape himself to a new mark directly the old one goes to ground.”
—“The White Darkness,” David Grann

“We are masters of our fate, that the task which has been set before us is not above our strength; that its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our cause and an unconquerable will to win, victory will not be denied us.”
—Churchill, via Antarctica 

“And if she did show insight, told them what was on her mind the day she killed her husband, why and how she did it and what she felt afterward—excitement, guilt, denial, fear, revulsion—if she showed the board how honest and precise she could be in her knowledge of her crime and why she’d committed it, if she spoke openly about the impact it had had on her victim and on others, on society, if she trotted out the whole horror of it, she would, at the same time, freshly reactivate for the parole board all the reasons she’d been locked up in the first place.”
—“Stanville,” Rachel Kushner

“I’m trying to help you, I said.

“How exactly are you trying to help me?

“I had no answer to his question. I confess that I do not know what brought me to make my confession to him. Or, rather, I did not know then, but perhaps I do now. I had worn my mask for so long, and here was my opportunity to take it off, safely. I had stumbled to this action instinctively, out of a feeling that was not unique to me. I cannot be the only one who believes that if others just saw who I really was, then I would be understood and, perhaps, loved. But what would happen if one took off the mask and the other saw one not with love but with horror, disgust, and anger? What if the self that one exposes is as unpleasing to others as the mask, or even worse?”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer

“We do not claim THE BLUE BOOK is either a City Directory or absolutely an Elite Directory; neither do we pretend
to pass upon the social or financial standing of the parties whose
names are contained therein. It is simply a compilation of
about four thousand names of the more prominent householders
of Toronto, Hamilton and London, and numerous smaller
towns, published in the most convenient form for reference by
our lady patrons.

The title ‘The Blue Book’ is given the work because of
its blue cover. It does not refer to blue blood, as many people
suppose. Webster’s definition of Blue Book is as follows:
‘Blue Book a book containing a list of fashionable addresses.’

The data for this work have not been compiled from circulars or from other directories. Experienced men, particularly adapted for such work, have been assigned to each
locality, and the greatest care has been used in selecting these

names.”—THE PUBLISHERS. 

“No, no, I want no God, I want to be alone. And one day it will come, yes, one day the capacity as red and affirmative as it is clear and soft will come in me, one day whatever I do will be blindly surely unconsciously, standing in myself, in my truth, so entirely cast in what I do that I will be incapable of speaking, above all a day will come on which all my movement will be creation, birth, I will break all of the noes that exist in me, I will prove to myself that there is nothing to fear, that everything I am will always be where there is a woman with my beginning, I will build inside me what I am one day, with one gesture of mine my waves will rise up powerful, pure water drowning doubt, awareness, I will be strong like the soul of an animal and when I speak my words will be unthought and slow, not lightly felt, not full of yearning for humanity, not the past corrupting the future! what I say will resound fatal and whole! there will be no space in me for me to know that time, man, dimensions exist, there will be no space in me to even realize that I will be creating instant by instant, not instant by instant: always welded, because then I will live, only then will I live bigger than in my childhood, I will be as brutal and misshapen as a rock, I will be as light and vague as something felt and not understood, I will surpass myself in waves, ah, Lord, and may everything come and fall upon me, even the incomprehensions of myself at certain white moments because all I have to do is comply with myself and then nothing will block my path until death-without-fear, from any struggle or rest I will rise up as strong and beautiful as a young horse.”
—Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“It was his fault, she thought coldly, anticipating a new wave of anger. It was his fault, it was his fault. His presence, and more than his presence: knowing that he existed, took away her freedom. Only rarely now, in a quick escape, was she able to feel. That was it: it was his fault. How hadn’t she discovered it earlier? she wondered victoriously. He stole everything from her, everything. And since the phrase was still weak, she thought intensely, her eyes closed, everything! She felt better, she thought with more clarity.”
—Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart

“Now and then [the mother] lifts her head and looks intently at the landscape that surrounds us. She stares at the various greens of the lawn, the hills, the woods in the distance. The glaring blue of the sky, the yellow hay. The bleached fence and low stone wall that marks the property line. She studies everything I look at every day. But I wonder what else she sees in it.”
—“The Boundary,” Jhumpa Lahiri

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
—Jack Gilbert

“I could easily lose hours there, observing the hidden life of tidal pools, and sometimes I marveled at the fact that I had been given such a gift: not just to lose myself in the present moment so utterly but also to have such solitude, which was all I had ever craved during my studies, my practice to reach this point.”
—Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer