"It can take a lifetime, a life of many years, to accept the incongruity of things: that a small moment can sit side by side with a big one, and become part of the same."
-- Rachel Joyce, author of Perfect
"Looking back on that time, it seems to me that I was not unhappy. Anxious, tired, unsure, occasionally mortified -- but never bored, never unengaged, always the thousand tiny cogs in my mind, whirling like Ferris wheels, twinkling like stars." -- Rachel Pastan, author of Alena
"Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it's a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself." -- Rebecca Mead, author of My Life in Middlemarch
"For if there is ever a moment when we are most vulnerable, it's when we're closest to the idea of the attained desire, and thus farthest from ourselves, which is when we'll tread through any flame." — Chang-Rae Lee, author of On Such A Full Sea
"Isolation offered its own form of companionship: the reliable silence of her rooms, the steadfast tranquility of the evenings. The promise that she would find things where she put them, that there would be no interruption, no surprise." -- Jhumpa Lahiri,author of The Lowland
"It was like her father said: never make people glad twice -- glad to see you come, and glad to see you go." -- Natalie Baszile, author of Queen Sugar: A Novel
"Those moments at the dinner table, I felt as Sveta were teaching me something important: that I didn't need to make every opinion known, didn't need to be filterless, that sometimes the best thing was to sit quietly and smile and sip my wine." ― Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans: Stories
"There's the story, then there's the real story, then there's the story of how the story came to be told. Then there's what you leave out of the story. Which is part of the story too." -- Margaret Atwood, author of MaddAddam
"The familiar streets sliding hazily by before my good eye looked only half familiar, and in my heart, I knew that I would be spend the rest of my life this way, seeing everything in monovision, missing half my visual perception and therefore half the world." -- Rosemary Mahoney, author of For the Benefit of Those Who See
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Before You Go
