mini feasts

"What's agitating about solitude is the inner voice telling you that you should be mated to somebody, that solitude is a mistake. The inner voice doesn't care about who you find. It just keeps pestering you, tormenting you ... You look up from reading the newspaper and realize that no one loves you, and no one burns for you. The workings of nature are mysterious, but they do account for a certain amount of despair among single persons, the irrelevance you sometimes feel."
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"Passion occupies a space that is not vacated until another passion occupies it."
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"One of the lyrical consolations of insomnia is that the sufferer becomes acquainted with the special luminous emptiness of 4 a.m., these spectral stirrings when, just before dawn, the spirits seem to be abroad and are moving slowly toward you for reassurance ... Not all insomnias are alike, as any victim of this condition knows very well."
--Charles Baxter, The Feast of Love

imitation

"The story was like an imitation of something literary, made by someone who hadn't developed a distinctive voice of his own."
--Meg Wolitzer, The Wife

darkness and light

"... the central reason why books have meant so much to me. It is not because of my pleasure in the art of writing, though that has been very great. It is because they have taken me so far beyond the narrow limits of my own experience and have so greatly enlarged my sense of the complexity of life: of its consuming darkness, and also--thank God--of the light which continues to struggle through."
--Diana Athill, Stet: An Editor's Life

know the right word

"Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule."
--Stephen King

bad numbers

"It’s the rare individual who, at the age of eighteen, knows very much about the world or even herself."
--Margaret Heffernan