Don DeLillo: Underworld

Don DeLillo: Underworld

I’ll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn’t give a damn or a fuck or a farthing. … I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real....
Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian

Cormac McCarthy: Blood Meridian

Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of...
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying

But I ain’t so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain’t. It’s like there was a fellow in every man that’s done a-past the sanity or the insanity, that watches the sane and the insane doings of that man with the same...
Mary Lawson: Crow Lake

Mary Lawson: Crow Lake

I am not from a background where people talk about problems in their relationships. If someone does or says something that upsets you, you don’t say so. Maybe it’s another Presbyterian thing; if the Eleventh Commandment is Thou Shalt Not Emote, the Twelfth...
Gillian Bradshaw: Cleopatra’s Heir

Gillian Bradshaw: Cleopatra’s Heir

I’m not »enough«, not good enough or wise enough or strong enough. They reverence what I’m supposed to be, but me … the me that is here, now, talking to you – they don’t even see. If I do something that makes them notice me – like...
Mary Lawson: The Other Side of the Bridge

Mary Lawson: The Other Side of the Bridge

The thought came into his mind – not drifting gently in but appearing suddenly, fully formed, like a cold hard round little pebble – that Jake hated him. The thought had never occurred to him before but suddenly, there it was. Though he couldn’t...