Brocha holds the braided candle, and Isaac says the prayer marking the end of Shabbat. After he says the last words, Hamavdil ben kodesh lihol, Nina asks, “What do you think is the best translation for that?”

“Mm.” they pause around the smoking candle.

–from “Kaaterskill Falls” by Allegra Goodman

…”I’m not like her, am I?”

This question is like the cowboy in Mulholland Drive, who you see again one time if you do good and two times if you do bad. Answer the question wisely, and you won’t have to hear it again for another year. Try to give a clever answer, and you have bigger immediate problems than the humidity index.

–from “Love Is a Mix Tape” by Rob Sheffield.

It’s the same with people who say, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Even people who say this must realize that the exact opposite is true. What doesn’t kill you maims you, cripples you, leaves you weak, makes you whiny and full of yourself at the same time. The more pain, the more pompous you get. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you incredibly annoying.

–from “Love Is a Mix Tape” by Rob Sheffield

by one who is proven wrong in other aspects in the end. So is he wrong about this?

Faith is a device of self-delusion, a sleight of hand done with words and emotions founded on any irrational notion that can be dreamed up. Faith is the attempt to coerce truth to surrender to whim. In simple terms, it is trying to breathe life into a lie by trying to outshine reality with the beauty of wishes. Faith is the refuge of fools, the ignorant, and the deluded, not of thinking, rational men.

–“Chainfire” by Terry Goodkind

Wright kept talking. “For me [Stephen] King is Emily Dickinson with balls, Emily Dickinson if she got the hell out of her house and lived in the real world.”

Horowitz leaned toward Adi. “I think the philosophers of old got it wrong. The big question in life is not how much pain and suffering can we endure, but how much happiness can we bear. That’s the real existential question for post-industrial, agnostic man. Things are going to get better for us. How many cruises can you take in retirement? How many all-you-can-eat buffets can you visit? These are the real issues facing us!”

–both from “Death of a Writer” by Michael Collins.

Love and hate hold hands always so it made natural sense that they’d get confused by upset married folk in the wee hours once in a while and a nosebleed or bruised breast might result.
–from “Winter’s Bone” by Daniel Woodrell. Best book I’ve read so far this year.

Since she had always considered herself a woman with broad interests, concern for world affairs, deep affections for a range of friends, and a driving ambition to pursue her own career, the discovery that apparently all she’d really wanted all along was to get laid by a particular snooker player was a little bit grim.

–from “The Post-Birthday World” by Lionel Shriver.

The seat had been moulded to the contours of another body and it felt strange underneath him. The key was in the ignition with a metal loop hanging from it from which depended in turn three other keys to doors he would never go through.

–from “The Quarry” by Damon Galgut.

I really like the image of keys that open doors that he will never go through; keys that will never again be used. Do keys with no doors (a.k.a. “purpose”) cease to be “keys” and become something else?

…the Weapon of Silence:
It has been said that silence is a powerful weapon; in a quite different sense it has a terrible power when wielded by those who are loved. It increases the anxiety of the one who waits. Nothing so tempts us to approach another person as what is keeping us apart, and what greater barrier is there than silence? It has been said too that silence is torture, capable of driving the man condemned to it in a prison cell to madness. But what even greater torture it is, greater than having to keep silent, to endure the silence of the person one loves!

…Physical Illness:
It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the sea, and with which we should be terrified to find ourselves condemned to live.

–from “The Guermantes Way” as translated by Mark Treharne in the new Penguin edition