"Sometimes a year is lavish and profuse, riotous as a gale. Sometimes it goes breath by breath by breath, in tiny, tiny sighs."
— Anthropology of an American Girl by H. T. Hamann
"If I didn’t let my mind run too far ahead, I felt completely happy."
— Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
"And so what I promised myself is that I would drive west until my car stopped running, and there I would stay."
— The Bean Trees, Barbara Kingsolver
"Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce of books and of romances."
— Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
"The new delight of independence soon made his loneliness bearable."
— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
"Probably in their marriage she had been too dreamy and inconsistent. For love to last, you had to have illusions or have no illusions at all. But you had to stick to one or the other. It was the switching back and forth that endangered things."
— “Like Life,” Lorrie Moore
"There is a way of walking in New York, midevening, in the big, blocky East Fifties, that causes the heart to open up and the entire city to rush in and make a small town there. The city stops its painful tantalizing then, its elusiveness and tease suspended, it takes off its clothes and nestles wakefully, generously, next to you. It is there, it is yours, no longer outwitting you. And it is not scary at all, because you love it very much."
— “Vissi D’Arte” in Like Life by Lorrie Moore
"It seemed suddenly to Mary that she would have to choose, that even if you didn’t know who in the world to love, it was important to choose. You chose love like a belief, a faith, a place, a box for one’s heart to knock against like a spook in the house."
— “Two Boys” in Like Life by Lorrie Moore
"I thought I understood something of a novel’s architecture, the lovely slope of predicament, the tendrils of surface detail, the calculated curving upward into inevitability, yet allowing spells of incorrigibility, and then the ending, a corruption of cause and effect and the gathering together of all the characters into a framed operatic circle of consolation and ecstasy, backlit with fibre-optic gold, just for a moment on the second-to-last page, just for an atomic particle of time."
— Carol Shields, Unless
"She was already a recognized writer of kinetic, tough-corded prose, both beguiling and dangerous. Her manner was to take the reader by surprise. In the middle of a flattened rambling paragraph, deceived by warm stretches of reflection, you came upon hard cartilage."
— Carol Shields, Unless
