Favorite NOVEL Passages
Novelists begin as readers. A reader I remain.
Great sentences and paragraphs echo for years because of the rhythm of the writing and the wisdom they contain. These novel passages are my breadcrumbs through the forest, in writing and in life.
“If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor, and you’re at rest.”
“You wanted the suffering you didn’t have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk, the admiring glances of your friends.”
“If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”
— Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
“There was something frightening about the aspect of old friends, old lovers, who had, mysteriously, come to nothing. It argued for the presence of some cancer which had been operating in them, invisibly, all along and which might, now, be operating in oneself. Many people had vanished, of course, had returned to the havens from which they had fled. But many others were still visible, had turned into lushes or junkies or had embarked on a nerve-rattling pursuit of the perfect psychiatrist; were vindictively married and progenitive and fat; were dreaming the same dreams they had dreamed ten years before, clothed these in the same arguments, quoted the same masters; and dispensed, as they hideously imagined, the same charm they had possessed before their teeth began to fail and their hair began to fall.”
-James Baldwin, Another Country
“Lee no longer remembered where that orchard had been, to whom it had belonged, why he’d been there, alone, he feels, moving resolutely on very small legs, and he no longer had any way to find out. Nobody to ask. An ocean of blossoms, in humped waves and boiling with bees, and in the distance the line of the actual sea, like the rim of his warm silver cup.”
Susan Choi, A Person of Interest
