'Cool-Hand Luke' is one of my favorite movies.

I learnt how to hunt rattlesnakes with an eagle for 'Serena.'

She’d never known fear had a taste, but it did.

My mother had brought me here when I was fifteen, on a Sunday after I’d read Look Homeward, Angel for the first time. She’d loved the novel, memorizing whole paragraphs, and, of course, naming me after the book’s main character. It is a novel you have to read as a young person or you don’t get it.

It struck her how eating was a comfort during a hard time because it reminded you that there had been other days, good days, when you’d eaten the same thing.

A great business investment, religion. I’ll take it over government bonds anytime.

He couldn’t imagine such a moment, believed instead that Serena’s beauty was like certain laws of math and physics, fixed and immutable.

Furthermore, even if ideas were gettable – say, stacked in a secluded cave like the Dead Sea scrolls – I wouldn’t go there. An ‘idea,’ especially one adhered to from start to finish, can be disastrous for a compelling piece of fiction.

Spend a long time alone, especially if you’re someone who’s never been that social to begin with, and you find yourself craving solitude.

Then her mind had wandered into a place she could not follow, taking with it all the people she knew, their names and connections, whether they still lived or whether they’d died. But her body lingered, shed of an inner being, empty as a cicada husk.