"She wasn't fine, and I could tell. I could tell because my mind has the ability to break down moments the way it can break down ceiling tiles. I can cut a moment into quarters, then eighths, then et cetera, and I am able to analyze whether one bit of behavior truly follows another, which it seldom does when a person is disturbed or influenced by a hidden psychic flow."
-Steve Martin, "The Pleasure of my Company"

"It was in this innocent way that Florentino Ariza began his secret life as a solitary hunter. From seven o'clock in the morning, he sat on the most hidden bench in the little park, pretending to read a book of verse in the shade of the almond trees, until he saw the impossible maiden walk by in her blue-striped uniform. She walked with natural haughtiness, her head high, her eyes unmoving, her step rapid, her nose pointing straight ahead, her bag of books held against her chest with crossed arms, her doe's gait making her seem immune to gravity. Florentino Ariza saw her pass back and forth four times a day and once on Sundays when they came out of High Mass, and just seeing the girl was enough for him. Little by little he idealized her, endowing her with improbably virtues and imaginary sentiments, and after two weeks he thought of nothing else but her. So he decided to send Fermina Daza a simple note written on both sides of the paper in his exquisite notary's hand. But he kept it in his pocket for several days, thinking about how to hand it to her, and while he thought he wrote several more pages before going to bed, so that the orignal letter was turning into a dictionary of compliments, inspired by books he had learned by heart because he read them so often during his vigils in the park."

-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Love in the Time of Cholera"

"Hey, sister. What's your situation?"
"On earth or in the universe?"
He laughed and said, "All right!"

-"Just Kids", Patti Smith

"'Hang on to the words,' he tells himself. The odd words, the old words, the rare ones. Valance. Norn Serendipity. Pibroch. Lubricious. When they're gone out of his head, these words, they'll be gone, everywhere, forever. As if they had never been."
-Margaret Atwood, "Oryx and Crake"

"'Horses frighten me as much as chickens do.' he said.
'That is too bad, because lack of communication with horses has impeded human progress,' said Abrenuncio. 'If we ever broke down the barriers, we could produce the centaur.'"
-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Of Love and Other Demons"

"'I never thought about how printing a photograph duplicates eyesight," I said. "It's the same exact process in slow motion.'
He nodded appreciatively and my heart warmed. I'd pleased him. 'Probably there is no real invention in the modern world,' he said. 'Just a good deal of elaboration on nature.' He lifted out the slick print and slipped it into a second tray, the fixer."
-Barbara Kingsolver, "Animal Dreams"

"For those poor souls who can think only of the terrible fear and danger of a runaway horse, think of this: a speed like water flowing over stone, a skimming sensation that hovers and dips while the world spins around and the wind drags your skin taut across your bones. You can close your eyes and lose yourself in the rhythm, because nothing you do or shout or wish for will happen until the running makes up its mind to stop. So you hold steady, balancing yourself in the wake, and unhook your mind from the everyday while you wait at the silent center of it all and hope that the feeling won't stop till you're good and ready for life to be ordinary once more.
The problem being that she never was."
-Meg Rosoff, Bride's Farewell