“It was raining in Richmond on Friday, June 6.” —Patricia Cornwell, Postmortem “The man who had had the room before, after having slept the sleep of the just for hours on end, oblivious to the worries and unrest of the recent early morning, awoke when the day was well advanced and the sounds of the city completely invaded the air of the half-opened room.” —Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Dialogue with the Mirror” “Pale freckled eggs.” —Nadine Gordimer, The Conservationist “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina “Don’t look for dignity in public bathrooms.” —Victor LaValle, Big Machine “I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station.” —William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch “The magician’s underwear has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami.” —Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction “You better not never tell nobody but God.” —Alice Walker, The Color Purple “I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists.” —Roberto Bolańo, The Savage Detectives Kraus, a 39-year-old experimental filmmaker and Sylvère Lotringer, a 56-year-old college professor from New York, have dinner with Dick _____, a friendly acquaintance of Sylvère’s, at a sushi bar in Pasadena.” —Chris Kraus, I Love Dick “See the child.” —Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
somewhere up here in the north—the core of it beneath one of these frozen fields; as if blue is a thing that emerges, in some parts of the world, from the soil itself, after the sun goes down.” —Rick Bass, “The Hermit’s Story” “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.” —Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” “Since it’s Sunday and it’s stopped raining, I think I’ll take a bouquet of roses to my grave.” —Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Someone Has Been Disarranging Roses” “When the blind man arrived in the city, he claimed that he had travelled across a desert of living sand.” —Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead “No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sinking into the sacred mud, but within a few days no one was unaware that the silent man came from the South and that his home was one of the infinite villages upstream, on the violent mountainside, where the Zend tongue is not contaminated with Greek and where leprosy is infrequent.” —Jorge Luis Borges, The Circular Ruins “In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.” —Carson McCullers, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter “Her father would say years later that she had dreamed that part of it, that she had never gone out through the kitchen window at two or three in the morning to visit the birds.” —Edward P. Jones, “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons” “A cradle won’t hold my baby.” —Daniel Woodrell, “My first and favorite task of the day is slaving over the Iliana Evermore Fairy Castle.” —George Saunders, “Downtrodden Mary’s Failed Campaign of Terror.” “One September evening when Walter Lasher returned from the city after a hard day’s work and was walking to his car in the station parking lot, a man stepped out from between two cars, walked up to him, and slapped him hard in the face.” —Stephen Millhauser, “The Slap” “A woman has written yet another story that is not interesting, though it has a hurricane in it, and a hurricane usually promises to be interesting.”