“Often he talked to Mr. Singer. With him he spoke of chemistry and the enigma of the universe. Of the infinitesimal sperm and the cleavage of the ripened egg. Of the complex million-fold division of cells. Of the mystery of living matter and the simplicity of death. And also he spoke with him of race.”
“The cheesemaker’s daughter and I were inseparable: nipping into and out of each other’s households as if we were fosterlings… climbing through the tall apple trees to gather the last of the fruit that still hung there… running to the gate as the hunting party brought in a full-sized boar, slung on a pole between two warriors… milking the cows as they grazed in the field or skimming the risen cream from the flat stone basins in the dairy yard. And everywhere we turned there were apples…”
“The sun was sinking into the saw-grass. The marsh was golden. The whooping cranes were washed with gold. The far hammocks were black. Darkness came to the lily pads, and the water blackened. The cranes were whiter than any clouds, or any white bloom of oleander or of lily. Without warning, they took flight.”
– The Yearling, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
“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
“It was not a disheveled, meaningless rush of emotions and moods; love was like nature, eternally changing and eternally giving birth, and no mood died away, no feelings withered except to give life to the seedling they bore within, to something even more perfect… And the days fell new and glistening from heaven itself now, not dragging by as a matter of course, one after the other like the worn out pictures in a stereoscope: every one of them was a revelation, for on each day he found himself greater and stronger and more distinguished.”
–Niels Lyhne, by Jens Peter Jacobsen, translated by Tiina Nunnally
“Two properly hemmed handkerchiefs, the first I had ever owned, that had sprigs of flowers in the corner… Then I had a comb with all the teeth in; a camisole, edged with lace, in good condition (I had nothing to fill it up with then, but the giver remarked that I would soon grow into it); and a much-battered tin trunk that looked very presentable when Dad had banged out the biggest dents with a hammer…”
–A Child in the Forest, by Winifred Foley
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