Whitehead

Lila Mae walks stiffly out of the parlor. Every room she enters lately is a cell, she thinks as she steps up the stairs to her guest quarters. Each room is an elevator cab without buttons, controlled by a malefic machine room. Going down, no one else gets on, she cannot step off. (Colson Whitehead, "The Intuitionist," p. 127)

Whitehead

There's one more lie, and it's the first one you told us. When I asked you for the time, you said you didn't know. But I know it was another one of your mendacities because I can see your watch right there, right below where Jim is holding your wrist. And that's the worst lie of all, because when a stranger asks you the time, you should never lie. It's just not neighborly. (Colson Whitehead, "The Intuitionist", 76-77)

Doerr

His flight had been futile; everything remains unburied, floating just at the surface, a breeze away from being dredged back up. And why? Save yourself, the nieghbors had told him. Save yourself. Joseph wonders if he is beyond saving, if the only kind of man who can be saved is the man who never needed saving in the first place. (Anthony Doerr, "The Caretaker," in "The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories," ed. by Ben Marcus)

Snicket

When somebody is a little bit wrong - say, when a waiter puts nonfat milk into your espresso macchiato, instead of lowfat milk - it is often quite easy to explain to them how and why they are wrong. But if somebody is surpassingly wrong - say, when a waiter bites your nose instead of taking your order - you can often be so surprised that you are unable to say anything at all. Paralyzed by how wrong the waiter is, your mouth would hang slightly open and your eyes would blink over and over, but you would be unable to say a word. ("The Reptile Room," Snicket, p. 73)

Snicket

There is a type of situation, which occurs all too often and which is occurring at this point in the story of the Baudelaire orphans, called "dramatic irony." Simply put, dramatic irony is when a person makes a harmless remark, and someone else who hears it knows something that makes the remark have a different, and usually unpleasant, meaning. For instance, if you were in a restaurant and said out loud, "I can't wait to eat the veal marsala I ordered," and there were people around who knew that the veal marsala was poisoned and that you would die as soon as you took a bite, your situation would be one of dramatic irony. Dramatic irony is a cruel occurrence, one that is almost always upsetting, and I'm sorry to have it appear in this story, but Violet, Klaus, and Sunny have such unfortunate lives that it was only a matter of time before dramatic irony would rear its ugly head. ("The Reptile Room", Lemony Snicket, pp. 31-32)

Alameddine

I was sitting, smoking a pipe by the fire, when Updike asked me, "What more fiendish proof of cosmic irresponsibility than a Nature which, having invented sex as a way to mix genes, then permits to arise, amid all its perfumed and hypnotic inducements to mate, a tireless tribe of spirochetes and viruses that torture and kill us for following orders?" (Rabih Alameddine, "Koolaids: The Art of War," 237)

Solzhenitsyn

If only there were evil people somewhere, insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart. (Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

Alameddine

What if I told you that life has no unity? It is a series of nonlinear vignettes leading nowhere, a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It makes no sense, enjoy it. (Koolaids, 38)

Calvino

Long novels written today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, we cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. (Calvino, quoted by Rabih Alameddine in "Koolaids: The Art of War", 4)