“I understand, through the power of her emotion, her tears, the way she is dissolving like soap left too long in the bath, that this has been the greatest tragedy of our lives.”

Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller

 

“She knew he, too, wanted the children to be like their neighbors’, the kind of children who sniffed at food that had fallen on the dirt, saying it was ‘spoiled.'”

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“The bungalows here were painted the color of the sky and sat side by side like polite well-dressed men…the hedges separating them were trimmed so flat on top that they looked like tables wrapped with leaves.”

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Feel her sadness at having to return to a land where doctors chase pregnant women with ultrasounds. Sense her outrage at being sent back to a crime-laden land of materialism and exclusion, where huge populations languish in jail, sprawl urine-soaked in the streets, or babble incoherently about God on the sweatpants-polished pews of megachurches.”

The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson

 

“Prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out all the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

 

“Ticks—counting minutes that have passed, keeping secret how many remain.”

“Still, Sky, Girl, and Marriage”  by Emily C. Watson

 

“He walked in his own footsteps for forty years.”

Racing in Place by Michael Martone

 

He “enrolled in the school of pain-without-dignity called ‘puberty.’”

“The Mickey Mantle Koan” by David James Duncan

 

“The Milky Way is a long smear on the sky, like something erased on a chalkboard.”

The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard

 

“How could a teacup shatter when padded in so many layers of memory.”

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra