As another collection from the novels I read last year, I present to you some of my favorite quotes. They are my favorite either because they express something in beautiful language, are profound in context or stuck with me throughout.
Enjoy!
"I remember this: the way she stood and looked at me, half raised her arms and then dropped them as though uncertain of her welcome, and the way I ran towards her anyway, the bright reality of her, and felt such wide white blinding love and relief that all other memories from that day disappeared." - Our Wives Under the Sea, Julia Armfield
"My body is a world full of tectonic inhalation and exhalation, volcanic heartbeats, oceans of blood, electrical storms of nerve endings. And my mind is that world's chief city." - The Odyssey Problem, Chris Willrich in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023
"... and you breathe in memory. The weight and mortality and the sensible shoes are just costume, falling away, and your real selves rise up, briefly, dancing rosy and naked, in the middle of the subway car." - White Houses, Amy Bloom
"Run isn't quite accurate. Their legs don't move. Their still-twitching feet don't touch the ground." - The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
"I like to think of my brain like that, tangled up in my skull. The idea that my brains could be untangled, straightened out and thus refashioned into a state of peace and sanity was a comforting fantasy. I often felt there was something wired weird in my brain, a problem so complicated only a lobotomy could solve it - I'd need a whole new mind or a whole new life." - Eileen, Otessa Moshfegh
"Amber gazes at me. Her eyes are the same waxy green color as the mile marker. 'You're my house, Del.'" - A Bird Sings by the Etching Tree, Nicole D. Sconiers in Out There Screaming
"But here it is, now, and here I am, too. And this train - very real, very concrete and travelling fast - is tearing us together. Close your eyes." - Assembly, Natasha Brown
"I turn back to survey the view. Even up here, I feel it against my skin, the thumping nationalism of this place. I am the stretched-taut membrane of a drum against which their identity beats. I cannot escape its rhythm. Everything awaits Monday - New York, then back in the office. For the rest of my life these Mondays loom loud, thudding and crashing, crescendoing on to me, tearing through -" - Assembly, Natasha Brown
"I remained leaning on the window, with a thirsty longing to plunge myself into the blue-moon mist, this dew and perfume and silence, which seemed to vibrate and quiver like the stars that strewed the depths of heaven." - A Wicked Voice, Vernon Lee, in Weird Fiction: An Anthology
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