From Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent:
I’m off the middle of nowhere. If you go to the middle of nowhere and then take a left, a right, another left until you come to a roundabout, take the second exit.
From Republic of Lies, by Anna Merlan:
To understand why people believe things that are at odds with all provable truths is to undestand how we form our views about the world and the resultant world we have made together. The riotous profusion of conspiracy theories in America shows us something about being American, even about being human—about the decisions we make in interpreting the complexities of our surroundings.
From Language City, by Ross Perlin:
Languages represent thousands of natural experiments: ways of seeing, understanding, and living that should rightly form a major part of any meaningful account of what it is to be human.
…
Dominant-language speakers opine that everything would be easier and better (and peace on earth!) if everyone would just speak their particular dominant language. But common languages don’t unify in and of themselves—look at many of the world’s civil wars, or the deep divisions in Anglophone American society today. The imaginative challenge of big differences is quickly replaced with the narcissism of small ones: scrutinizing other people’s accents, sociolects, word choice, tone of voice.
…
A language is not learned by memorizing words, but by sharing life with those who speak it.
From Unnatural Ends, by Christopher Huang:
What might Juliet have achieved and become, had Romeo not crossed her path?
From Fourteen Days, by various authors and the Authors Guild:
My mother says as a newborn I looked like a muskrat, “just shriveled and wrinkled and a bit mischevious, as if you’d been here before.”
