from The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

In the hush that followed, Miss Winter seemed to draw all of her external self into her core; under my very eyes she managed to absent herself from herself, and I began to understand how it was that earlier I had failed to see her. I watched the shell of her, marveled at the impossibility of knowing what was going on beneath the surface.

from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by C.S. Lewis

The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when [Aslan] began to tear the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.

from Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams

It was then, lying there in the bed beside her sleeping husband, that Margaret Looney realised there was to be an emptying as much as a filling of her heart with love, and that as much as her heart had expanded and grown in the first girlish weeks of love in Donegal, filling her until bursting, now, in the years left, there was to be the slow drop by drop bleeding back of it all. It would all have to be given back, and day after day as the hardship of their life dulled into routine -- window panes that rattled under the lash of the wind for months on end, rain that leaked beneath the doors, her husband out and drinking, electricity cut off and the radio shut down, the boredom, the quiet and incredible loneliness -- Margaret Looney would remember when she first discovered love and wonder at how immense it must have been to be lasting so long.

from That They May Face the Rising Sun by John McGahern

"Would you like a whiskey, Jamesie?" she asked.
"Now you're talking, Kate. But you should know by now that 'wilya' is a very bad word."
"Why bad?"
"Look at yer man," he pointed to where Ruttledge had already taken glasses and a bottle of Powers from the cupboard and was running water into a brown jug.
"I'm slow."
"You're not one bit slow, Kate. You just weren't brought up here. You nearly have to be born into a place to know what's going on and what to do."

A Warning to My Readers, by Wendell Berry

Do not think me gentle
because I speak in praise
of gentleness, or elegant
because I honor the grace
that keeps this world. I am
...a man crude as any,
gross of speech, intolerant,
stubborn, angry, full
of fits and furies. That I
may have spoken well
at times, is not natural.
A wonder is what it is.

by George Eliot

If we had keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

from My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok

"That is where your pictures will hang in the spring," Anna Schaeffer said to me, pointing to the walls.
    I stared at her and felt a shock move through me.
   "I would have done it this year," she said. "But this old man would not let me."
   "He is still a boy this year," Jacob Kahn said. "A boy should not rush to make his soul naked."

from The Forgotten Garden, by Kate Morton

   "Life'd be a lot easier if it were like a fairy tale," said Cassandra, "if people belonged to stock character types."
   "Oh, but people do, they only think they don't. Even the person who insists such things don't exist is a cliche: the drear pedant who insists on his own uniqueness!"
   Cassandra took a sip of wine. "You don't think there's any such thing as uniqueness?"
   "We're all unique, just never in the ways we imagine."