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book excerpts i highlighted on my kindle

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The Power — Naomi Alderman

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He runs pell-mell across an open plain between two great bodies of trees, feet pushing off from the ground as if he could become a bird now, a stream now, a tree now.

The Power — Naomi Alderman

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These things are happening all at once. These things are one thing. They are the inevitable result of all that went before. The power seeks its outlet. These things have happened before; they will happen again. These things are always happening.

The Power — Naomi Alderman

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There is already so much porn of it. The single dependable human desire is very adaptable; what there is, in humans, is sexy. This, now, is what there is.

The Power — Naomi Alderman

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The Porpoise — Mark Haddon

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I didn’t know the cost Of entering a song – was to lose your way back

Ocean Vuong, ‘Threshold’; The Porpoise — Mark Haddon

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Wanting something this much feels like a rope around her neck. So she succumbs and protests and succumbs and protests. She stares into his eyes, catches herself and mocks him mercilessly in compensation. She is desperate to be in his company then equally desperate for solitude.

The Porpoise — Mark Haddon

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He was a man who could withstand any physical pain, face any danger, take rational decisions in situations where lesser men would crumble. Now he wants to die. He has always considered this cowardice. Why settle for the eternal blankness of the afterlife when you can throw the dice one more time? He understands now. It is a decision taken not in the head or the heart, but in the belly.

The Porpoise — Mark Haddon

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Let it all burn. None of it matters any more. If this city did not exist, if there were only kelch grass and stone pines and spider crabs and black-backed gulls and the perpetual, unwitnessed accounting of the waves, would the world be richer or poorer?

The Porpoise — Mark Haddon

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She has been taught to flatter, to please, to depend, to give way, to make herself small and quiet. She has been told to be soft so that men will always have a means by which they can hurt and control her, that ring through the nose which men call femininity.

The Porpoise — Mark Haddon

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His crime and his punishment should cancel out. Instead they combine to form some terrible new thing.

The Porpoise — Mark Haddon

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American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson 

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I learned that a secret is power, that power in application is force, that force is strength, and strength advantage.

American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson 

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But I do feel sometimes like I’ve been trapped in an absurdist’s fever dream, and that if I couldn’t find a way to see humor in our lives, I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.

American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson 

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Throughout my life, the most consistent way I’ve revealed who I really am is through whom I’ve chosen to love.

American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson 

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Her attitude didn’t seem like rudeness, obsequiousness, or timidity—it seemed to reflect a sincere and complete lack of interest in me. I respected that.

American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson 

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The only anger I ever expose to the world is through implication, by suggesting that I’m on the brink of no longer being able to contain my fury. That is what a woman’s strength looks like when it’s palatable: like she is containing herself.

American Spy — Lauren Wilkinson