"From this moment on, I thought, nothing will be as it was."

~Per Petterson

"...for the first time in his life he became aware of loneliness."

~John Williams

"A childhood that passed with an eye's blinking."

~William Gay

"Everything that gave her pleasure was small and depressed him."

~Flannery O'Connor

"The frailty of everything revealed at last."

~Cormac McCarthy

"I rose this morning, and I didn't know right from wrong."

~ Garfield Akers

"He hoped obscurely that she could save him, but he did not even know from what."

~William Gay

"It was quiet save for the sounds made by cicadas hidden in the trees."

~Alain de Botton

"Normally sleep could be relied upon to dispel the terrors of the day."

~Joseph Roth

"In the end the only thing that never changed, never became deformed, were animals."

~Michael Ondaatje

"...we endured the wreath on the door..."

~William Maxwell