One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Forces upon us at every page the wonder and extravagance of life. Page 7 About the author

At first he told them that everything was just the same, that the pink snails were still in the house where he had been born, that the dry herring still had the same taste on a piece of toast, that the waterfalls in the village still took on a perfumed smell at desk. They were the notebook pages again, woven with the purple scribbling, in which he dedicated a special paragraph to each one. Nevertheless, and although he himself did not seem to notice it, those letters of recuperation and stimulation were slowly changing into pastoral letters of disenchantment. One winter night while the soup was boiling in the fireplace, he missed the heat at the back of his store, the buzzing of the sun on the dusty almond trees, the whistle of the train during the lethargy of siesta time, just as in Macondo he had missed the winter soup in the fireplace, the cries of the coffee vendor, and the fleeting larks of springtime. Page 402

But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She meant that when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness and his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past. Page 43 - 44

The Painted Girls by Cathy Marie Buchanan

Begin, you Darlings, without the futile help Of beauty - leap despite your common face, 

Leap, soar! You priestesses of grace. 

For in you the Dance is embodied now, Heroic and remote. From you we learn, Queens are made of distance and grease paint. 

- Edgar Degas, from 8 Sonnets 

I understand what he is not saying - that riches do not come to the poor girls of Paris by way of honest laboring. And so, my feet numb with cold and soggy boots, my skin soaked through to my knees with grit and filth and wintertime, I spin a tale. A small house by the sea. A roof of thatch. A garden. Sunshine spilling down. Him, his freedom won, with a hoe. Or maybe a fishing net. Yes, a fishing net. And me, a settler's wife, cooking up those fish all but jumping into his tiny boat. Page 219 - 220

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

An accident, they said, and there was nobody to blame - it was just fate and the way fate has of providing the destitute with a greater quota of accidents for which nobody can be blamed. Page 15

Presumably Saeed had been warned of Indians, but he didn't seem wracked by contradictions; a generosity buoyed d him and dangled him above such dilemmas. Page 86

The whole system seemed to favor, in fact, the criminal over the righteous. You could behave badly, say you were sorry, you would get extra fun and be reinstated in the same position as the one who had done nothing, who now had both to suffer the crime and the difficulty of forgiving, with no goodies in addition at all. And, of course, you would feel freer than ever to sin if you were aware of such a safety net: sorry, sorry, oh so sorry. Page 219

Worst are those who think the poor should starve because it's their own misdeeds and past lives that are causing problems for them... The fact was that no one was left empty-handed. There was no system to soothe the unfairness of things; justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure as so-called civilization. For crimes that took place in the monstrous dealings between nations, for crimes that took place in those intimate spaces between two people without a witness, for these crimes the guilty would never pay. There was no religion and no government that would relieve the hell. Page 219

In the valleys, it was already night, lamps coming on in the mossy, textured loam, the fresh-smelling darkness expanding, unfolding its foliage. The three of them drank Old Monk, watched as the black climbed all the way past their toes and their knees, the cabbage-leafed shadows reaching out and touching them on their cheeks, nose, enveloping their faces. The black climbed over the tops of their heads and on to extinguish Kanchenjunga glowing a last brazen pornographic pink... each of them separately remembered how many evenings they'd spent like this... how unimaginable it was that they would soon come to an end. Here Sai had learned how music, alcohol, and friendship together could create a grand civilization. Nothing so sweet, dear friends - Uncle Potty would say raising his glass before he drank. Page 244

This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate. The space between life and death, in the end, too small to measure. Page 303

The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan- Philipp Sendker

And so there must be in life something like a catastrophic turning point, when the world as we know it ceases to exist. A moment that transforms us into a different person from one heartbeat to the next. The moment when a lover confesses that there's someone else and that he's leaving. Or the day we bury a father or mother or best friend. Or the moment when the doctor informs us of a malignant brain tumor. Or are such moments merely the dramatic conclusions of lengthy processes, conclusions we could have foreseen if only we had read the portents rather than disregarding them? And if these turning points are real, are we aware of them as they happen, or do we recognize the discontinuity only much later, in hindsight? Page 23

She suspected that her words only ever reached him and that way, encoded, that he lived in a world closed to her, one she must approach gingerly and respectfully. She had experienced so much sorrow of her own, so much of life, that she knew better than to press for access to his places of refuge. She had witnessed herself how individuals became prisoners of these strongholds, or their loneliness, confined therein until their dying day. She had hope that Tin Win would learn what she had learned over the years: that there are wounds time does not heal, though it can reduce them to a manageable size. Page 77

His principal aim was to pass on the lesson life had taught him: that a person's greatest treasure is the wisdom in his own heart. Page 115

We see that there is no place on earth where we can hide from fear, yet still we attempt to find one. We strive for wealth and power. We abandon ourselves to the illusion that we are stronger than fear. We try to rule - over our children and our wives, over our neighbors and our friends. Ambition and fear have something in common: neither knows any limits. But with power and wealth it is just as with the opium I sampled more than once in my youth - neither keeps its promises. Opium never brought me eternal happiness. It only demanded more and more of me. Money and power do not vanquish fear. There's only one force more powerful than fear. Page 125

He didn't know whether he had stumbled over a stone, a root, or a rut cut into the earth by the rain. He knew only that he had committed the most foolhardy of blunders: overconfidence. He had ceased to be attentive. He had set one foot in front of the other without concentrating, absent-mindedly. Page 140

He seemed to think anyone was capable of anything, or at least he wouldn't exclude the possibility just because he thought he knew the person. And he insisted that this did not represent the worldview of an embittered pessimist. On the contrary, he had said. It would be much worse to expect good from other people, only to be disappointed when they didn't measure up to our high expectations. That would lead to resentment and contempt for humanity. Page 156

Over time they established a fixed ritual for unlocking the secrets of this new world. Having taken a few steps, they would pause, silent and motionless. Their silence might last a few minutes, half an hour, or even longer. Tin Win was soaking up the sounds, tones, and noise. Then he would describe in detail what he heard, and Mi Mi would tell him what she saw. Like a painter she sketched the scene for him, at first roughly, then with increasing precision and detail. When images and tones did not coincide they launched a search for the sources of the unfamiliar sounds. She crawled through hedgerows and bushes, dragged herself across flower beds and under houses, took apart stone walls and put them back together. She rummaged through wood piles and dug with her hands in meadows and fields until she found what Tin Win heard: sleeping snakes and snails, earthworms, moths. With each passing day Tin Win came to know the world better. Thanks to Mi Mi's descriptions, he could connect sounds with objects, plants, and animals. He learned that the wing beats of a swallowtail butterfly sounded brighter than those of a monarch; that the leaves of a mulberry tree rustled differently in the wind from those of the guava; that the chomping of a wood worm was not to be confused with that of a caterpillar; that the rubbing of hind legs was distinct from fly to fly. It was a whole new alphabet. Page 178

Whence this magic? I could not understand a single word they sang. What was it that affected me so? How can a person be moved to tears by something she can neither see, understand, nor hold on to, a mere sound that vanishes almost the moment it comes into being? Music, my father often said, was the only reason he could sometimes believe in a god or in any heavenly power. Page 234

Because we see only what we already know. We project our own capacities - for good as well as evil - onto the other person. Then we acknowledge as love primarily those things that correspond to our own image thereof. We wish to be loved as we ourselves would love. Any other way makes us uncomfortable. We respond with doubt and suspicion. We misinterpret the signs. We do not understand the language. We accuse. We assert that the other person does not love us. But perhaps he merely loves us and some idiosyncratic way that we fail to recognize. I hope you will understand what I mean once I have finished my story. Pages 243 - 244

She longed for Tin Win, too, but she did not suffer from a broken heart. It marks a face forever, that pain, but Mi Mi never experienced it. Her features never hardened, not even in old age. It may seem difficult to understand, Julia, but physical distance or proximity we're really irrelevant to her. I have often wondered what was the source of her beauty, her radiance. It's not the size of one's nose, the color of one's skin, the shape of one's lips or eyes that make one beautiful or ugly. So what is it? Can you, as a woman, tell me? I shook my head. I will tell you: It's love. Love makes us beautiful. Do you know a single person who loves and is loved, who is loved unconditionally and who, at the same time, is ugly? There's no need to ponder the question. There is no such person. He poured tea and took a sip. Page 290

Must one have seen the world? In this village, in every house, in every shack, you will find the entire range of human emotions: love and hate, fear and jealousy, envy and joy. You needn't go looking for them. I looked at him and was moved by the sight: a little man, dressed in rags, with stumps for teeth, who with a bit of luck might just as easily have been a professor with a luxurious apartment in Manhattan or house in some London suburb. Which of us had lost perspective? Was it me with my demands or him with his modesty? I was not sure what I felt for him. It wasn't pity. It was a curious kind of affection. I wanted to shelter him even while I knew very well that he had no need of my protection. At the same time, I felt secure - cozy, almost - in his company. As if he were shielding me from something. I trusted him. Until then I had thought you needed to know a person in order to like him or feel close to him. Page 296

The question why, the search for a cause of death, is too great a luxury under such circumstances. My wife died in the night. I woke up in the morning and found her dead next to me. That's all I know. Page 315

Excerpts from The Movement of Stars by Amy Brill

She was used to the echoey ring a fatigue, but there was no comfort in the thought of the morning ahead. Page 10

I look for changes. New things in the night sky. Page 69

Regret is a wasted emotion, Hanna, Dr. Hall said d. It offers no comfort to the soul, for what's done cannot be undone. This, on the other hand... He picked up the cane and swing it in an arc, indicating the bookshelves surrounding them. Shakespeare. Milton. Plato. Euclid. Here is where comfort lies. In knowledge. Especially when shared. Page 169

She blinked in the brightness of day, then turned away from Town and began to walk west. Air and sky, dirt and leavess, these were what she needed. Things devoid of malice. Page 221

In the last light of the day, the flowers blazed as if to defy their own transience. Page 329

What would it be like to see the sky only in this way? A sparkling picture, pretty as a quilt. To lie each night beside a man and stare at the sky with no more care than for the next day's supper, for nicely tatted lace, ripe tomatoes, clean aprons? Page 364

What, I wondered, would compel a teenage girl to spend her nights alone on the roof of her house, staring at the stars for hours on end, sweeping the skies in hopes of spotting something so few people had the opportunity to see? Page 381

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