Below are small excerpts and clippings that I’ve extracted from things I’ve read or re-read recently.

(posts one and two)

“Experience taught Strike that there was a certain type of woman to whom he was unusually attractive.  Their common characteristics were intelligence and the flickering intensity of badly wired lamps.” -Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm

“He looked as though he had been carved out of soft ebony by a master hand that had grown bored with its own expertise, and started to veer towards the grotesque.” -Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo’s Calling

“He could see a new set of muscles hardening in the right forearm of his wife, Teresa, from the constant twisting of oranges on the juicer while their children held up their cups and waited for more.” -Ann Patchett, Commonwealth

“If a man can’t build a violin, he may as well make pizzas in a former violin shop.” -Molly Wizenburg, Delancey

“Until you forgive, you defend yourself against the possibility of understanding.” -Marilynn Robinson, Home

“But unlike his brothers, Henry had a redeeming attribute.  Two of them, to be exact: he was intelligent, and he was interested in trees.” -Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice.  If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if outcompeting one’s rivals was the key to dominance, adaptation and endurance–then what was one supposed to make, for instance, of someone like her sister Prudence?”   -Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

“To see a thing in its proportion, whatever it was, to draw its outlines true and sure and simple–that was bottomless content, which lightened all the world.” -Pearl S. Buck, The Proud Heart