"When she thinks about her northern childhood now, she thinks of her father, flying to the Slope with all the other fathers, toiling in permafrost. She sees him in his work coat and heavy boots, hard hat over a woolen skullcap, slipping coins into the slot of a vending machine, pressing the button and hearing the click and the drop, reaching his undamaged left hand through the metal flap for the candy bar."

- Alexis M. Smith, Glaciers

"'One time, I made this joke that my marriage was like a push-up bra. It looked pretty good underneath a shirt, but you know it's all just padding and by the end of the day you can't wait to take the damn thing off. My friends laughed, but I felt icy, because I realized I had inadvertently told the truth and it was awful."

- Torrey Peters, Detransition Baby

"The full moon is silhouetted against the sea, smothering the waves with silver reflections. Sitting on a dune, we watch the continuous ebb and flow, each with our own thoughts. For me, the sea has always been a confidant, a friend absorbing all it is told and never revealing those secrets; always giving the best advice - its meaningful noises can be interpreted any way you choose. For Alberto, it is a new, strangely perturbing sight, and the intensity with which his eyes follow every wave building, swelling, then dying on the beach, reflects his amazement. Nearing 30, Alberto is seeing the Atlantic for the first time and is overwhelmed by this discovery that signifies an infinite number of paths to all ends of the earth."

- Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries

"This is not a story of heroic feats, or merely the narrative of a cynic; at least I do not mean it to be. It is a glimpse of two lives running parallel for a time, with similar hopes and convergent dreams

In nine months of a man's life he can think of a lot of things, from the loftiest of meditations on philosophy to the most desperate longing for a bowl of soup - in total accord with the state of his stomach. And if, at the same time, he's somewhat of an adventurer, he might live through episodes of interest to other people and his haphazard record might read something like these notes.

And so, the coin was thrown in the air, turning many times, landing sometimes heads and other times tails. Man, the measure of all things, speaks here through my mouth and narrates in my own language that which my eyes have seen. It is likely that out of 10 possible heads I have seen only one true tail, or vice versa. In fact it's probable, and there are no excuses, for these lips can only describe what these eyes actually see. Is it that our whole vision was never quite complete, that it was too transient or not always well-informed? Were we too uncompromising in our judgments? Okay, but this is how the typewriter interpreted those fleeting impulses raising my fingers to the keys, and those impulses have now died. Moreover, no one can be held responsible for them."

- Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries

"It would have been kinder to lie, but I wasn't kind any more. Maybe I never had been. I vaguely remember a childhood kindness, but maybe I was conflating innocence and kindness. I felt so little continuity between what I was as a young child and who I was now that it seemed pointless to even consider showing my mother something like mercy. Would I have been merciful when I was a child?"

- Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

"Paz once responded in an interview: "Every minute we become someone else. The person now talking about somebody else differs from the person who was talking about somebody else a minute ago. In this case, who, then, is the other? We are time, and in order to become time we never complete our lives; we are always just on the point of living. Just on the point of living? And what might that be? I have no idea. In the course of asking and responding, we give rise to something that changes us completely, something that changes us into unpredictable creators."

- Octavio Paz via Bei Dao's The Blue House

"Hiruko's grandmother said she needed to shovel snow or she'd get stiff all over, so even at age 100, she used to look for back alleys that weren't equipped with sensors so she could shovel the snow there. Her shovel would rise so lightly you'd have thought the cloud god was pulling it up form the sky by an invisible rope, then toss its load of snow exactly on the same spot her grandmother was aiming for. All that snow, piled up in the same place, looked like a castle made of sugar. As a child, Hiruko never got tired of watching her grandmother shovel snow."

- Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth

"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were. I don't know what I am. I don't know if I am or not. Jewel knows he is, because he does not know that he does not know whether he is or not. He cannot empty himself for sleep because he is not what he is and he is what he is not."

- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she preserved, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back to her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girlfriends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine leather patent boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart."

- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

"He never looked better, nor had he been loved more, nor had the breeding of his animals been wilder. There was a slaughtering of so many cows, pigs, and chickens for the endless parties that the ground in the courtyard turned black and muddy with so much blood. It was an external execution ground of bones and innards, a mud pit of leftovers, and they had to keep exploding dynamite bombs all the time so that the buzzards would not pluck out the guests' eyes."

- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

"They say that people who are near death die generally at the change to dawn or at the turn of the tide. Anyone who has when tired, and tied as it were to his post, experienced his change in the atmosphere can well believe it."

- Bram Stoker, Dracula

"It was as though, so long as the deceit ran along quiet and monotonous, all of us let ourselves be deceived, abetting it unawares or maybe through cowardice, since all people are cowards and naturally prefer any kind of treachery because it has a bland outside. But now it was like we had all - and by a kind of telepathic agreements of admitted fear - flung the whole thing back like covers on the bed and we all sitting bolt upright in our nakedness, staring at one another and saying "Now is the truth. He hasn't come home. Something has happened to him. We let something happen to him."

- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

"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 of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past."

- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

" 'It's coming,' she finally explained. 'Something frightful, like a kitchen dragging a village behind it.'

At that moment the town was shaken by a whistle with a fearful echo and a loud, panting respiration. During the previous weeks they had seen the gangs who were laving ties and tracks and no one paid attention to them because they thought it was some new trick of the gypsies , coming back with whistles and tambourines and their age-old and discredited song and dance about the qualities of some concoction put together by journeymen geniuses of Jerusalem. But when they recovered from the noise of the whistles and the snorting, all the inhabitants ran out into the street and saw Aureliano Triste waving from the locomotive, and in a trance they saw the flower-bedecked train which was arriving for the first time eight months late. The innocent yellow train that was to bring so many ambiguities and certainties, so many pleasant and unpleasant moments, so many changes, calamities, and feelings of nostalgia to Macondo."

- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

"The lips are warm after death, said Shelley. Who does not lie beside the beloved all night as the body cools? Who does not hold the body in her arms, frantic to bestow heat and reanimate the corpse? Who does not tell himself that this is but winter? In the morning surely the sun will come?"

- Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein

"After dissection, in the old days, the human remains might be ground up as bonemeal, or rendered into candles, or fed to the pigs. There was no waste. You could say that burial is a waste -- at least the way it's done these days, in solid caskets, worm-proof, rain-proof, anything to stop the natural processes of death.

Death is natural. Yet nothing looks more unnatural than a dead body."

- Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein

"The only problem with cryonics is that no one knows how to reheat the body without destroying it. But, as Max points out, Leonardo da Vinci made drawings of helicopters centuries before powered flight.

The time will come, says Max. It always does."

- Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein