In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd by Ana Menendez

"And then she would smile and tilt her head back, and her laughter connected him again to that night, made him believe for a moment that life was a string you could gather up in your hands all at once."

A Complicated Kindess by Miriam Toews

"My dad loved the shit out of her and hardly ever knew what to say to her and she loved the shit right back out of him and filled the silent parts of their lives with books and coffee and other things."

"The gap between our feelings, his and mine, on that particular point was immeasurable."

"It may have been the light at 5:36 on a June evening or it may have been the smell of dust combined with sprinkler water or the sound of the neighbour kid screaming I'll kill you but suddenly it was like I was dying, the way I missed her."

"Relationships were so easy when all you had to work on was standing up together."

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

"They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered."

"What we feel now is the sense of all the gorgeous youth that has rioted through here in two hundred years."

"With her his imagination ran riot and that is why they rode to the highest hill and watched an evil moon ride high, for they knew then that they could see the devil in each other."

"The idea, you know, is that the sentimental person thinks things will last -- the romantic person has a desperate confidence that they won't."

"I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again."

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

"You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style."

"We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives."

"And I catch myself thinking today that our long journey had only defiled with a sinuous trail of slime the lovely, trustful, dreamy, enormous country that by then, in retrospect, was no more to us than a collection of dog-eared maps, ruined tour books, old tires, and her sobs in the night - every night, every night - the moment I feigned sleep."

"in a dismal ex-prairie state, with the wind blowing, and the stars blinking, and the cars, and the bars, and the barmen, and everything soiled, torn, dead."

"and there she was with her ruined looks and her adult, rope-veined narrow hands, and her goose-flesh white arms, and her shallow ears, and her unkempt armpits, there she was (my Lolita!), hopelessly worn at seventeen, with that baby, dreaming already in her of becoming a big shot and retiring around 2020 A.D. - and I looked and looked at her, and knew as clearly as I know I am to die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth, or hoped for anywhere else."

"I insist the world know how much I loved my Lolita, this Lolita, pale and polluted, and big with another's child, but still gray-eyed, still sooty-lashed, still auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine."

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

"The sound of the horses like roses being burned alive."

"Facts are bigger in the dark."

"Spirit rules secretly alone the body achieves nothing."

The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes

"emotion is even, perhaps, the slyest of losses."

A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco

"Semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot in fact be used 'to tell' at all."