"His whole being revolted, he was terrified by the way Nana had for some time now been slowly invading his consciousness and taking hold of him, reminding him of the pious texts, the stories of possession by the Devil on which he had been reared. He believed in the Devil."

Nana by Émile Zola

 

"Over the next two years I sank, half deliberately, into a dreamy inwardness, a lush romanticism that kept an active gregariousness around it like a hard shell protecting a creamy yolk. Piano playing was the natural art form to express this."

Sleep is Now a Foreign Country: Encounters with the Uncanny by Mike Barnes

 

"'In the meantime,' said Abrenuncio, 'play music for her, fill the house with flowers, have the birds sing, take her to the ocean to see the sunsets, give her everything that can make her happy.' He took his leave with a wave of his hat and the obligatory sentence in Latin. But this time he translated it in honor of the Marquis: 'No medicine cures what happiness cannot.'"

Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez

 

"The bright sprint to Christmas. I didn't know how I was going to keep buoyant. The exorbitant levels of pride my life seemed to demand. That, or absolutely none at all."

Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt

 

"He writes to say he loves her every eyelash, every step, every turn, every laugh. Is the eyelash overdoing it, should he leave it out? He decides to keep it, but changes the period after 'laugh' into a comma, and goes on: everything but your immortal soul, with which I haven't had the pleasure."


Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck

 

"These days it's hard to grasp tomorrow. Tomorrow seems an eternity away, as if it were happening on another planet. One can imagine tomorrow in theory, but not as a moment in one's own passage of time—only as a story one tells oneself."

War Diary by Yevgenia Belorusets

 

"There is no thrill of mortal danger to surpass that of a lone man trying to create something that never existed before."

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone

 


"What would you do if you could start over? I ask. Fabienne ponders this for a long time, then she says, I can't be the one I was once. I don't want to be her either. I think I would do everything the same, just as wrong and just as right. What about you?"

The Archive of Feelings by Peter Stamm

 

"Well, these things wax and wane—detachment and tenderness, incredible tenderness and then incredible inaccessibility, that's the pattern with people who've stuck together as long as we have. What I'm thinking about with her isn't that. It's the love that exists because it's compartmentalized. The stolen moment that can't be sustained."

Deception by Philip Roth

 

"The presence of unknown people sleeping arouses a natural respect in honest minds, and in spite of ourselves we were intimidated by this. And that cracked, irregular concerto of breathing, and the ticking of clocks, and the poverty of the houses, gave the impression of precarious, troubled rest; and the signs of the war you could see all around – blue lights, poles propping up walls, piles of sandbags, arrows pointing the way to shelters, and even our very own presence – all this seemed a threat to the sleep of exhausted people."

Into the War by Italo Calvino