Soldier of Fortune

“It was days like this, she decided, looking down at the rain-swept street, black days with a black sky and a heaviness in the air, that revealed things about Jane Hoyt—that Jane Hoyt didn’t like.  The specifications called for a Jane Hoyt who was more or less one-dimensional, alert, well-educated major in English literature, matter of fact, sense of humor, American society pigeonhole number sixteen, which was located a little below the junior league pigeonhole and a little above the shopgirl pigeonhole… There was no allowance in the pattern for healthy girls, regardless of pigeonhole, who still had a renegade ghost of savage underlying their well-groomed exterior.”

• from Soldier of Fortune, by Earnest K. Gann

The Scorpio Races

“I wonder if, when I talk about Dove, people can hear how I love her the way that I can hear his fondness for Corr in his voice.  It’s hard for me to imagine loving a monster, though, no matter how beautiful he is.  I remember what the old man said in the butcher’s, about Sean Kendrick having one foot on land and one foot in the sea.”

• from The Scorpio Races, by Maggie Stiefvater

My Brilliant Friend

“She wrote, in the last pages, of feeling all the evil of the neighborhood all around her.  Rather, she wrote obscurely, good and evil are mixed together and reinforce each other in turn.  Marcello, if you thought about it, was really a good arrangement, but the good tasted of the bad and the bad tasted of the good, it was a mixture that took your breath away… ‘And I feel that I have to find a solution, otherwise, everything, one thing after another, will break, everything, everything.'”

-Lena reads a letter from Lila, My Brilliant Friend, Elena Ferrante, trans. Ann Goldstein