Plot, in fact, is yearning challenged and thwarted.

–Robert Olen Butler

At high noon in a village deep in the marshes, in what seems to Fetter to be the uttermost depths of this wild valley, in a village of three faded-grey tents that doesn’t deserve the name–it has no sentry box and the bicycle ruts approaching it have almost faded away–set in a small area of cleared damp earth surrounded by writhing mangrove swamps on all sides, a familiar face finds him and asks for an exorcism.

The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera

Nabokov’s definition of aesthetic bliss: “a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” 

If you spend enough time with a story, it will reveal all of the secrets of its construction.

Aaliyah Bilal

“Good stories slip past our defenses—we all want to know what happens next—and then slow time down, and compel our interest and belief in other lives than our own, so that we feel ourselves in another presence. It’s a kind of awakening, a deliverance, it cracks our shell and opens us up to the truth and singularity of others—to their very being.”

Tobias Wolff

It was over. Grace leaned back in her chair and stared through the solid wall into her imagination: giant seas, tiny rafts rising and falling on them, rain or snow or sleet, howling winds. If they were not all dead, what would they be doing? How long could they survive in the cold, with just the resources in those rafts?

Elizabeth Moon, Cold Welcome

The world was their orphanage.

Lorrie Moore, “Wings”

I was carried to Ohio in a swarm of bees.

The National, “Bloodbuzz Ohio”

A little later, remembering man’s earthly origin, “dust thou art and to dust thou shalt return,” they like to fancy themselves bubbles of earth. When alone in the fields, with no one to see them, they would hop, skip and jump, touching the ground as lightly as possible and crying “We are bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth! Bubbles of earth!”

Flora Thompson, Lark Rise

“It was time at last for a full renunciation of the way I had been living, fast then slow, the blood and brain, the inner dynamo.”
—Edward McWhinney, “Down the Harbor”