• Custom-Made Bride by Kurt Vonnegut

"You are being suffocated by tradition... Why don't you say, 'I am going to build a life for myself, for my time, and make it a work of art'? Your life isn't a work of art ---it's a thirdhand Victorian whatnot shelf, complete with someone else's collection of seashells and hand-carved elephants."

• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

"And on and on it went--that duet between the dumb, praying lady and the big, hollow man who was so full of loving echoes."

• Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

"This was the world in which she grew and he aged. They made for themselves a sanctuary from Trachimbrod, a habitat complet...

• More Than Just a House

There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

• First Blood

But the first stars were out over Lake Shore Drive, and all about her she could feel Chicago swinging around its circle at a hundred miles an hour, and Josephine knew that she only wanted to want such wants for her soul's sake. Actually, she had no desire for achievement. Her grandfather had had that, her parents had had the consciousness of it, but Josephine accepted the proud world into which she was born.

The force of her lies came from her sincerity and from her simple and superb confidence that whomsoever she loved must love...