Iain Reid
- I'm Thinking of Ending Things
For years, my life has been flat. I'm not sure how else to describe it. I've never admitted it before. I'm not depressed, I don't think. That's not what I'm saying. Just flat, listless. So much has felt accidental, unnecessary, arbitrary. It's been lacking a dimension. Something seems to be missing.
Iain Reid
- I'm Thinking of Ending Things
A memory is its own thing each time it's recalled. It's not absolute. Stories based on actual events often share more with fiction than fact. Both fictions and memories are recalled and retold. They're both forms of stories. Stories are the way we learn. Stories are how we understand each other. But reality happens only once.
Julia Fine
- The Upstairs House
If it didn't hurt so much, I thought it might even be funny, Margaret's timing. Michael's timing. My own. The second I'd realized that I loved Clara - the night that Ben came home from his first business trip - Michael had swept in to claim her. Michael had held on ever since. The joke was that as soon as I recognized love, as soon as I named it, its object was no longer mine.
Susanna Kaysen
- Girl, Interrupted
If I who was previously revolting am now this far from my crazy self, how much further are you who were never revolting, and how much deeper your revulsion?
Alice Feeney
- Sometimes I Lie
I've always delighted in the free fall between sleep and wakefulness. Those precious few semiconscious seconds before you open your eyes, when you catch yourself believing that your dreams might just be your reality. A moment of intense pleasure or pain, before your senses reboot and inform you who and where and what you are. For now, for just a second longer, I'm enjoying the self-medicated delusion that permits me to imagine that I could be anyone, I could be anywhere, I could be loved.
Delmira Agustini
- The Ineffable
I die strangely. It is not life that kills me. It is not death that kills me, nor is it love; I die of a thought, mute as a wound. Have you never felt such a strange pain of an immense thought that is rooted in life, devouring flesh and soul, and without blooming? Have you never carried inside a dormant star that was burning you wholly without shining?
Cecilia Woloch
- New Year
Winter light shining like grief in your hair, black as the wing of a crow, and like joy. The old year dying around us then; the weather all bright wind, wild and clear.
Peter Beagle
- The Last Unicorn
The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone. She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.
Mary Oliver
- On Meditating, Sort Of
Of course I wake up finally thinking, how wonderful to be who I am, made out of earth and water, my own thoughts, my own fingerprints - all that glorious, temporary stuff.
Marilyn Monroe
I was full of a strange feeling, as if I were two people. One of them was Norma Jeane from the orphanage who belonged to nobody, the other was someone whose name I didn't know. But I knew where she belonged. She belonged to the ocean and the sky and the whole world.
Jane Shore
- Literature
Life is a series of missed chances; cartons of books you always meant to read but didn't, a book containing one poem about love and death which might have saved you.
Anaïs Nin
- The Early Diary of Anaïs Nin
I wonder if the life I am leading is a dream or a reality. I feel far away from everything and everybody, ever so far away, and I feel as if all the adventures which succeed on another incessantly were unfolding themselves like a play in a theater - and I, miles and miles away, watching. For a long time tonight I have stood absolutely still, lost in an odd introspection, watching with an inward eye the progress of these years in our life.
Neil Gaiman
- Cinnamon
Her eyes were pearls, which gave her great beauty, but meant she was blind. Her world was the color of pearls: pale white and pink, and softly glowing.
Marya Hornbacher
- Waiting
I clung to my anger, for fear that without it I'd lose some mysterious (imaginary) "edge." I clung to my resentments, because I had been nursing them so long I couldn't imagine life without their poisonous satisfaction. I clung to my regrets, and they were legion, going over and over the smallest mistakes I'd made as well as the biggest, hating myself for all I'd done and all I'd failed to do.
