1
....And let me tell you something about families they're overrated. They're a weakness. The leave you or get taken from you or they disappoint you. Families are a liability.Michael Robotham
2
It was mild monsters like these that made Jack the Ripper go after young women, she decided: who could tolerate yielding the world to someone who behaved as if she had given birth to the very world herself?Gregory Maguire
3
Women can go mad with insomnia. The sleep-deprived roam houses that have lost their familiarity. With tea mugs in hand, we wander rooms, looking on shelves for something we will recognize: a book title, a photograph, the teak-carved bird -- a souvenir from what place? A memory almost rises when our eyes rest on a painting's grey sweep of cloud, or the curve of a wooden leg in a corner. Fingertips faintly recall the raised pattern on a chair cushion, but we wonder how these things have come to be here, in this stranger's home. Lost women drift in places where time has collapsed. We look into our thoughts and hearts for what has been forgotten, for what has gone missing. What did we once care about? Whom did we love? We are emptied. We are remote. Like night lilies, we open in the dark, breathe in the shadowy world. Our soliloquies are heard by no one. .Cathy Ostlere
4
You want some advice?"" Yes"" Never go to a doctor whose office plants have died.Michael Robotham
5
It took me a moment to realize but I was having an epiphany. I was standing in the middle of Times Square wearing nothing but purple tennis sneakers with the laces pulled out, clutching an empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand and a shit-eating grin in the other. Rodney and Samantha stood about ten feet away, laughing their asses off as people walked by me without so much as a sideways glance. My clothes lay crumpled on the ground at my feet, my Redskins baseball cap upside down and jutting up out of my jeans like the crater of some long-dormant volcano. .Meridian Way
6
There’s a light pulsing somewhere, its soft, amber glow gently seeping into the delicate skin covering my eyes, pooling in the tiny gullies on either side of my nose. My body feels heavy, burdened with the weight of a thousand year sleep.Meridian Way
7
I can hear someone whispering, like a mother quieting her small child: shhh…shhh…shhh…a pregnant pause taking shape and growing between each whisper, bringing life to the next series of sounds. They last no more than a few seconds, these brief acts of creation.Meridian Way
8
The cab driver is staring at me in his mirror. I'm talking to myself." The second sign of madness, " I explain." What's the first one?"" Killing lots of people and eating their genitals." He laughs and sneaks another look at me.Michael Robotham