The curse on Sonia Ocampo’s life came without warning before she was even born, cleverly disguised as good luck.
— Meg Medina (The Girl Who Could Silence The Wind)
They rolled into town in the middle of the day: large covered wagons and flatbed trucks hauling disassembled rides that looked like futuristic dinosaur bones.
— Cecil Castellucci and Nate Powell (The Year of the Beasts)
I hadn’t killed anyone all winter, and I have to say I felt pretty good about that.
— Anne Greenwood Brown (Lies Beneath)
I should probably start with the blood.
— Robin Wasserman (The Book of Blood and Shadow)
Delaney and I had a history of not dying. Seventeen years of it, actually.
— Megan Miranda (“Eleven Minutes”)
Imagine four years.
Four years, two suicides, one death, one rape, two pregnancies (one abortion), three overdoses, countless drunken antics, pantsings, spiled food, theft, fights, broken limbs, turf wars—every day, a turf war—six months until graduation and no one gets a medal when they get out. But everything you do here counts.
Highschool.
— Courtney Summers (Cracked Up To Be)
Ruby said I’d never drown—not in deep ocean, not by shipwreck, not even by falling drunk into someone’s bottomless backyard pool.
— Nova Ren Suma (Imaginary Girls)
The robbery was not without consequences. The consequences were the point of the robbery. It was never about money. The thief didn’t even ask for any. That it happened in a bank was incidental.
— Andrew Kaufman (The Tiny Wife)
You might think this is a rather horrible and depraved sort of story. But that’s because you’re a nice person.
— Trevor Cole (Practical Jean)
To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for ‘Artistic,’ or ‘Passionate,’ thinking you could live with ‘Sensitive,’ secretly fearing ‘Narcissistic’ and ‘Domestic,’ but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: ‘Incurably Romantic.’
— Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
