House Rules: A Memoir

by Rachel Sontag

It's never the loneliness that nibbles away at a person's insides, but not having room inside themselves to be comfortably alone.

The Secret Scripture

by Sebastian Barry

Dear reader! Dear reader, if you are gentle and good, I wish to clasp your hand. I wish -- all manner of impossible things.

After all the world is indeed beautiful and if we were any other creature than man we might be continuously happy in it.

----------

The terror and hurt in my story happened because when I was young I thought others were the authors of my fortune or misfortune; I did not know that a person could hold up a wall made of imaginary bricks and mortar against the horrors and the cruel, dark tricks of time that assail us, and be the author therefore of themselves.

The Bell Jar

by Sylvia Plath

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantine and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above those figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which fig to choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.