Rebecca Makkai quotes:

And second, everyone is so weird, but they're all completely accepted. It's like, okay, you have a pumpkin head, and that guy's made of tin, and you're a talking chicken, but what the hell, let's do a road trip.

...all I knew were novels. It gave me pause, for a moment, that all my reference points were fiction, that all my narratives were lies."

Like a good American, I wanted to sue somebody. But like a good librarian, I just sat at my desk and waited.

The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep. ~ "The November Story

By then there had been other men. She'd flung herself at other closed windows. The windows never broke, but her heart, at the end, was in splinters.

[E]scaping is its own special brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls who didn't save themselves. ~ The Worst You Ever Feel

Isn't it what all librarians strive toward, at least in the movies and cliches? Silence, invisibility, nothing but a rambling cloud of old book dust.

We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them.