"He can’t quite picture God except as a huge ball of light with an old man’s deep voice like in the pickup truck ads on TV coming out of the ball of light dictating the way everything in Eden is supposed to work."
-- Russell Banks, _Lost Memory of Skin_
#SundaySentence #books #cosobooks
The jogger, the first person to see the peak of the volcano sprouting from the middle of the reservoir in Central Park, in the early hours of June 2, thought the volcano was a breaching humpback whale. . . . She stared at it for a full minute--stretching all the while--before continuing her run. She couldn't afford to stop any longer because she didn't want her heart rate to drop.
-- John Elizabeth Stintzi, _My Volcano_
But why would I want to revisit a place that I regard as the opening wound in a wounded life?
-- Russell Banks, _The Magic Kingdom_
When I was in eighth grade my sister helped kill another girl. She was in love, my mother said, like it was an excuse.
-- Stewart O'Nan, _Ocean State_
Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, . . .
The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between.
-- Barbara Kingsolver, _Demon Copperhead_
The temptation of the old, born into the middle of things, was to see in their deaths the end of everything, the end of times. That way their deaths made more sense
-- Ian McEwan, _Lessons_