Favorite NOVEL Passages
Novelists begin as readers. A reader I remain.
Great sentences and paragraphs echo for years because of the rhythm of the writing and the wisdom they contain. These novel passages are my breadcrumbs through the forest, in writing and in life.
“If you’ve not known the dragon we were chasing, words may not help. People talk of getting high, this blast you get, not so much what you feel as what you don’t: the sadness and dread in your gut, all the people that have judged you useless. The pain of an exploded leg. This tether that’s meant to to attach you to something all your life, be it home or parents or safety, has been flailing around unfastened all this time, tearing at your brain’s roots, whipping around so hard it might take out an eye. All at once, that tether goes still on the floor, and you’re at rest.”
“You wanted the suffering you didn’t have, the authority you thought it would bring. It scared you, but you thought of the swagger it would put in your walk, the admiring glances of your friends.”
“If we could just be on earth at the same place and same time as everyone we loved, if we could be born together and die together, it would be so simple. And it’s not. But listen: You two are on the planet at the same time. You’re in the same place now. That’s a miracle. I just want to say that.”
— Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers
