Davis

“Anyway, said Robert, they got a big fright. After that they started dropping pellets in the water and digging latrines and spraying for flies and bringing buckets of soap. But do you think they do it because they love us? Not a hope. They prefer it that we live because we look too terrible when we get sick and die. If we grew thin and turned into paper and then into ash and floated away, they wouldn't give a stuff for us. They just don't want to get upset. They want to go to sleep feeling good.”
― J.M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K

“When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

“He could never forgive her for "cheating" on his father. His words, not hers. A child's word. "Selfish bitch," he'd called her once, he who knew nothing of selfishness or bitchery, no more than he knew of selflessness or whatever the opposite of bitchery was (sophrosyne?), knew only his own colossal ego, too self-centered even to understand why he couldn't simply dismiss her as evil and forget it. Sweet Christ how she hated him! But no. No more than she hated his father. It was past that. Caught in impossibilities, but knowing, at least, why she hated the part of herself she hated and why she could not escape, ever, for all the grinning cow-catchers and whistling boats and twinkling propellers in Christendom. Ah, Christendom! she thought.”
― John Gardner, The Sunlight Dialogues

“It was a dark and clouded night, but the tracks led to the lake like a broad path. Sylvie walked in front of me. We stepped on every other tie, although that made our stride uncomfortably long, because stepping on every tie made it uncomfortably short. But it was easy enough. I followed after Sylvie with slow, long, dancer's steps, and above us the stars, dim as dust in their Babylonian multitudes, pulled through the dark along the whorls of an enormous vortex--for that is what it is, I have seen it in pictures--were invisible, and the moon was long down. I could barely see Sylvie. I could barely see where I put my feet. Perhaps it was only the certainty that she was in front of me, and that I need only put my foot directly before me, that made me think I saw anything at all.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping