Saturday

He began to cry, not hysterically or screaming as people cry when concealed rage with tears, but with continuous sobs who has just discovered that he's alone and will be for long. He cried because safety and reason seemed to have left the world. Loneliness was a reality, but in this situation madness was also remotely a possibility.
--Stephen King, The Talisman

Regret, already sogging me down, burst its dam. It seeped into my legs, it pooled in my heart.
--Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

Man," he said, "I'm not afraid of graveyards. The dead are just, you know, people who wanted the same things you and I want."
"What do we want?" I asked blurrily.
"Aw, man, you know," he said. "We just want, well, the same things these people wanted."
"What was that?"
He shrugged. "To live, I guess," he said.
--Michael Cunningham, A Home At The End Of The World

If there really had been a Mercutio, and if there really were a Paradise, Mercutio might be hanging out with teenage Vietnam draftee casualties now, talking about what it felt like to die for other people's vanity and foolishness.
--Kurt Vonnegut, Hocus Pocus

I do believe that there's life after love, and also that there is love, still, after a life is over.
--Wally Lamb, The Hour I First Believed