What strange anxiety did all this trigger in Sylvia? The precarious nature of her own happiness, the instability of character, persona, identity, even affection. The instability of identity — how we are seen only one dimension at a time. Cyrilly saw a kindred bluestocking. Laurie Glazer saw a cultivated beauty. Ann Burnside saw a caviar-stuffing barbarian. Howe we are labeled for our glamour — or lack of it. That French perfumes were far more important than she even imagined (and Sylvia never doubted their importance). That if you stand still for a moment the world keeps moving, that sometimes no head will turn despite shiny hair and freshly applied lipstick. That many of your peers will want less than you, and that you will envy them for that. —Elizabeth Winder, Pain, Parties, Work:  Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953

As if men had a monopoly on murder. —Moriarty, Elementary

People look so beautiful when their expressions show that they know they have a future. —Nakajima in Banana Yoshimoto’s The Lake

A nightmare is real, but how light, how colorless the words that must be used to convey it after one wakes up! Words that had been repeated hundreds, even thousands of times, over and over again - they fluttered in the air, distorted and charred like the pages of a burnt book. Their original typeface, the messages they were once meant to convey, had long since turned to ash. —Hwang Sok-young, The Guest