--Anthony Doerr, All The Light We Cannot See
I had had a feeling of freedom because of the sudden change in my life. By comparison to what had come before, I felt immensely free. But then, once I became used to that freedom, even small tasks became more difficult. I placed constraints on myself, and filled the hours of the day. Or perhaps it was even more complicated than that. Sometimes I did exactly what I wanted to do all day—I lay on the sofa and read a book, or I typed up an old diary—and then the most terrifying sort of despair would descend on me: the very freedom I was enjoying seemed to say that what I did in my day was arbitrary, and that therefore my whole life and how I spent it was arbitrary.
--Lydia Davis, Can't And Won't
Where most people live, most of us, imagining it to be the real sunlit world when it is only a cave lit by the flickering fires of illusion.
--E.L.Doctorow, Andrew's Brain
When she's next to him, when she rests her hand on his, his whole body aches with something like knowledge for all he has lost, the chances he will never have, to return such a touch, to fall of a horse or eat chinese food or shoot a crossbow (which has always been one of his most dear wishes), to receive a letter in the mail, to be kissed with longing or punched in the jaw.
--Brady Udall, The Lonely Polygamist
A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle, right?
--Anna Quindlen, Still Life With Bread Crumbs