EDEN CLOSE by Anita Shreve

“Eden had been too much a part of his life—as much a piece of his geography as the hydrangea tree outside his window, whose white puffy blossoms are turning now to salmon as they do at the end of every summer; or as the way his mother looked each morning at breakfast in her bathroom, nursing her coffee as she stared out the kitchen window, making, he always thought, some kind of peace with the weather and with how the day seemed about to unfold.”

 

IF YOU’RE NOT THE ONE by Jemma Forte

“Meanwhile, Jennifer had began plundering the reserves of her memory, something else she’d been doing a lot lately, searching for feelings she longed to relive, for there was an enormous comfort to be taken from the fact that, of course, things hadn’t always been this way.”

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY by Oscar Wilde

“I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.”

 

WHY WE WRITE edited by Meredith Maran

“When I feel that the story is beginning to pick up rhythm–the characters are shaping up, I can see them, I can hear their voices, and they do things that I haven’t planned, things I couldn’t have imagined–then I know the book is somewhere, and I just have to find it, and bring it, word by word, into this world.” -Isabel Allende