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“I wanted to hold onto the house the way you'd hold onto a love letter. It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in the world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn't.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“He was waiting, I think, for me to cross that space and take him in my arms again—waiting, as one waits at a deathbed for the miracle one dare not disbelieve, which will not happen.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“And again and again fell the word, like the ebb of a dying sea.

"Good-bye.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“Oliver came up to me and asked me to play something on the piano.

'What would you like?' I asked.

'Anything.'

This would be my thanks for the most beautiful evening of my life. I took a sip from my second martini, feeling as decadent as one of those jazz piano players who smoke a lot and drink a lot and are found dead in a gutter at the end of every film.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Then the not-memory washed away like a wet painting in a storm, and I was in the shower, shaking, and she was outside, losing me, and there was no way for me to tell her not to.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“Everything is soft, like a fresh oil painting.”
― Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties: Stories

“Or were we like people who have died before their time and are given a second chance by some minor deity, but with so many provisos that the new life feels like a deferred death?”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“I lunged out to grab the fruit from his hand, but with his other hand he caught hold of my wrist and squeezed it hard, as they do in movies, when one man forces another to let go of a knife.”
― André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name

“Here he comes like a stealing shadow, like a footprint of death into the rooms, stalking the past with freshcut blood in his hands.”
― Sophocles, Electra

“But the whole thing didn't go anywhere—though it never went away either. It just sat there, no past, no future, like a glass of wine filled to the rim but never drunk from.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“But I was still anxious. Trevor Trevor Trevor. I might have felt better if he were dead, I thought, since behind every memory of him was the possibility of reconciling, and thus more heartbreak and indignity. I felt weak. My nerves were frayed and fragile, like tattered silk. Sleep had not yet solved my crankiness, my impatience, my memory. It seemed like everything was now somehow linked to getting back what I'd lost. I could picture my selfhood, my past, my psyche like a dump truck filled with trash. Sleep was the hydraulic piston that lifted the bed of the truck up, ready to dump everything out somewhere, but Trevor was stuck in the tailgate, blocking the flow of garbage. I was afraid things would be like that forever.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I'm like someone who never got off a train that traveled past the last stop.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“But she saw nothing in my eyes—she stared at me as though I had made a long journey on a white charger all the way to her prison house.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“What did we talk about that has left me with an impression of wings and flashes, as of air displaced by the flight of a bird? Of swooping and soaring, of a faint iridescence subdued to the enfolding brightness of the day?”
― L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

“I saw through a black veil of misery and remorse and indecision and fear; and there was a feeling as if I carried a small leaden coffin in the place of my heart.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea

“My head is already stuffed with grief I suppose like a pomegranate with its red seeds. I can only bleed grief, having no room for more.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“Her smile was a supernova: blazing, beautiful, short-lived.”
― Ellen Miller, Like Being Killed

“A restaurant overlooking a starlit night sprang to my imagination like something out of an illuminated manuscript from the late Middle Ages.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“We made our way deeper into an extremely quiet alley, then through another, as if drawn through these unreal and sticky goblin lanes that seemed to lead to a different, nether realm you entered in a state of stupor and wonderment.”
― André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

“Until now, talk has never gone anywhere. All I do is steal wisps of information in the hope of cobbling together your portrait, the way sketch artists do at police stations.”
― André Aciman, Enigma Variations

“He tongue swiped my sex like was licking the frosting off a cupcake. I called out to heaven again. . . . My sounds encouraged him to torture me.”
― Eric Jerome Dickey, One Night

“Alas! that Henry should fade away as reality emerged, and only her love for him should remain clear, stamped with his image like the cameos we rescue out of dreams.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“We topped a rise just then, and the moor stretched out ahead of us, silvery-white and rustling, like a wide ghostly sea. In the distance lay Grimsgrave Hall, black and hulking as a ship adrift on moonlit waves.”
― Deanna Raybourn, Silent on the Moor

“The sky wraps us in a chilled blanket of milky stars.”
― Charlotte Menke, The Emotional Embodiment of Stars

“Unfathomable. Fathoms. I wonder is that the difficulty, that my memories and my imaginings are lying deeply in the same place? Or one on top of the other like layers of shells and sand in a piece of limestone, so that they have become the same element, and I cannot distinguish one from the other with any ease, unless it is from close, close looking?

Which is why I am so afraid to speak to Dr. Grene, lest I give him only imaginings.

Imaginings. A nice sort of a word for catastrophe and delusion.”
― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture

“We tried mindspeech again. I had never before sent repeatedly to a total non-receiver. The experience was disagreeable. I began to feel like an atheist praying.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

“Some comparisons are comparable to comparing apples and oranges’ seeds.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“On occasion I read Raymond Chandler although I have certain reservations about this author. Chandler, while obviously a master of his craft, makes overuse of simile, to my annoyance.”
― Jack Vance, This Is Me, Jack Vance!: Or, More Properly, This Is "I"

“Along its raw dirt floor, puddles of afternoon rain reflected the starlit sky, like jagged slivers of mirror.”
― Scott Westerfeld

“The chanting droned loudly and was not constant, shifting from an almost Gregorian invocation to a twisted yodel, as if someone were driving a steamroller over a crowd of Swiss musicians.”
― Daniel O'Malley, The Rook