He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise. He watched her chest rise and fall in rapid succession as her fingers made fists and released, and her eyes squinted for no apparent reason.

-Jonathan Safran Foer, from Everything Is Illuminated

We go on, with a motion so soporific, so dreamlike as to be uninferant of progress, as though time and not space were decreasing between us and it.
- William Faulkner, from As I Lay Dying

Your morning
glories are beautiful
to look at in this photograph.
Beautiful is how I remember them.
-Sandra Cisneros, from Fan of a Floating Woman

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.
-Theodore Dreiser, from Sister Carrie

Spiders, by contrast, would also travel extensively; however, they would go not by jet, but by Gypsy Bus, because they would not be seeking to capture the world in color slides but to web its pieces together in unity. I know these things from watching ants and traveling with spiders.
-Harvey Manning, from Walking the Beach [...]

I had removed my patent leather shoes after a while, for they foundered badly in the sand. It pleased me to think they would be perched there on the silver log, pointing out to sea, like a sort of soul-compass, after I was dead.
-Sylvia Plath, from The Bell Jar

The rain was coming down in gray swaths. When they reached the highway, they could barely see across the fields to a faint line of woods. The girl kept leaning forward, squinting into the opaque windshield.
-Flannery O’Connor, from The Partridge Festival

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.
–Annie Dillard, from Holy The Firm

While I would wait for the drinks everyone, all five of them including Hand, would bound off to the dancefloor, holding hands, like a string of kids connected, cut from folded construction paper.
-Dave Eggers, from You Shall Know Our Velocity

But I forgot that I am moralizing in the most interesting part of my tale, and your looks remind me to proceed.
-Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein