Slower Than Quotes & Sayings

The war on apathy moved much slower than real wars fought on the ground. — Orson Scott Card

Men are more conventional than women and much slower to change their ideas. — Kathleen Norris

Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Five simple truths embody most of what we know about inflation: Inflation is a monetary phenomenon arising from a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output (though, of course, the reasons for the increase in money may be various). In today's world government determines - or can determine - the quantity of money. There is only one cure for inflation: a slower rate of increase in the quantity of money. It takes time - measured in years, not months - for inflation to develop; it takes time for inflation to be cured. Unpleasant side effects of the cure are unavoidable. — Milton Friedman

Small businesses were slower than large businesses in adopting broadband. One of the reasons was they were concerned with putting their customer lists online or in the cloud. — Julius Genachowski

Squished between my grandparents and moving at thirty miles an hour is a small price to pay to get to the vet's office, but today Luke begged to come along, so Papaw is driving even slower than usual. With Luke hunched don behind us in the bed of the truck, obviously without a seat belt, Mamaw keeps her eye on the odometer and yells about "precious cargo" every time the needle nears twenty. — Alecia Whitaker

Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect. — Friedrich Nietzsche

My recovery, though slower than hoped for, is nevertheless assured. — Frederick William Borden

Just after midnight, I text my parents who live in Florida: Please tell me you didn't help elect him.

No reply.

The next morning, New York City wakes up with a wet, gray yawn. The air is thick with mist. The city moves at a slower, muffled pace. New Yorkers rarely make eye contact; today isn't much different, except when eyes meet, they lock for a moment in shared grief. Everyone's shoulders bend forward, the world weighing heavier on them than it did yesterday.

The sidewalks and the coffee shops are quiet. Even the subway paces through its underground veins in somber silence. My husband tells me: "The city hasn't been this quiet since 9/11."

- Melissa Lirtsman — Erin Passons

I lie in a bathtub of cold water, still sweating and singing love songs to myself. I put the gun to my head and cock it.
I think of my Grandma and remember that old feeling of being so in love that nothing matters except seeing and being seen by her. I drop the gun to my chest. I'm so sad and I can't really see a way out of what I'm feeling but I'm leaning on memory for help. Faster. Slower. I think I want to hurt myself more than I'm already hurting. I'm not the smartest boy in the world by a long shot, but even in my funk I know that easy remedies like eating your way out of sad, or fucking your way out of sad, or lying your way out of sad, or slanging your way out of sad, or robbing your way out of sad, or gambling your way out of sad, or shooting your way out of sad, are just slower, more acceptable ways for desperate folks, and especially paroled black boys in our country, to kill ourselves and others close to us in America. — Kiese Laymon

I'm not fast. But there are a lot of guys that are a hell of a lot slower than I am. Somebody wants to do a pay-per-view race between me and [Tom] Brady, sign me up. — Drew Bledsoe

Say your boss has been taking longer than usual to respond to your e-mails. Many people would take that as a sign that their star is falling because if your star is falling, the chances are high that your boss will respond to your e-mails more slowly than before. But your boss might be slower in responding because she is unusually busy or her mother is ill. And so the chances that your star is falling if she is taking longer to respond are much lower than the chances that your boss will respond more slowly if your star is falling. The appeal of many conspiracy theories depends on the misunderstanding of this logic. That is, it depends on confusing the probability that a series of events would happen if it were the product of a huge conspiracy with the probability that a huge conspiracy exists if a series of events occurs. The effect on the probability that an event will occur if or given that other events occur is what Bayes's theory is all about. To — Leonard Mlodinow

From my own experience I can say that a bad back makes you hike slower, stove-up knees keep you from wading confidently, tendinitis of the elbows buggers your casting, and a dose of giardia can send you dashing to the bushes fifteen times in an afternoon, but although none of this is fun, it's discernibly better than not fishing. — John Gierach

My father was slower, but he was severer than my mother, who was quick but light and irregular in discipline. — Lincoln Steffens

Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac? — George Carlin

The truth always arrive too late because it walks slower than lies. Truth crawls at a snail's pace. — Maryse Conde

Your goal is simple: Finish. Experience your first race, don't race it. Your first race should be slightly longer or slightly faster than your normal run. Run your first race. Later you can race. You will be a hero just for finishing, so don't put pressure on yourself by announcing a time goal. Look at it this way: The slower you run the distance, the easier it will be to show off by improving your time the next race! — Bob Glover

It is a bit more challenging for the simple fact that now the stories I am writing are relying more on my imagination than on facts, more on research than on memory; so it is basically a slower writing process, more reading, more exploring. On the other hand, this approach is a little bit relieving too, since many times while writing [How the Soldieer Repairs the Gramophone] I felt too close and equal to my character. — Sasa Stanisic

Nation moves slower than market. — Toba Beta

I've always tried to separate my looks from all the other aspects of myself. I think girls are taught so much to focus on their looks that they tend to have their personality and intelligence develop slower than boys — Natalie Portman

One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own special, definite qualities; that a man is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, etc. Men are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, oftener wise than stupid, oftener energetic than apathetic, or the reverse; but it would be false to say of one man that he is kind and wise, of another that he is wicked and foolish. And yet we always classify mankind in this way. And this is untrue. Men are like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man, In some people these changes are very rapid, and Nekhludoff was such a man. — Leo Tolstoy

She watches the people through the sooted panes. They walk slower than they do when she reports to work and when she leaves work, and differently still from weekend strolling. They are the tin men and rag dolls who wake after hours in the toy store. — Colson Whitehead

While we may live longer than our ancestors, we are in fact dying slower. — Jeff Leach

The years went by, and Mary Alice and I grew up, Slower than we wanted to, faster than we realized. — Richard Peck

There is no relation more intimately personal than that of parents to the child they have brought into the world; and there is therefore no relationship in which the community should be slower to interfere. — Suzanne La Follette

Do you need me to come pick you up? (Janine)
No. I appreciate the thought, but I have to wait on the tow truck, which seems to be the only thing moving slower than my DOA Firebird. (Taryn) — Sherrilyn Kenyon

Stahr's eyes and Kathleen's met and tangled. For an instant they made love as no one ever dares to do after. Their glance was slower than an embrace, more urgent than a call. — F Scott Fitzgerald

Ramona could not understand why grown-ups always talked about how quickly children grew up. Ramona thought growing up was the slowest thing there was, slower even than waiting for Christmas to come.
She had been waiting years just to get to kindergarten, and the last half hour was the slowest part of all. — Beverly Cleary

We've incentivized people in the past to maybe turn their vehicles over, you know sooner rather than later. And in the United States with the squeeze on discretionary income and credit that even as the economy comes back there's probably more of a chance than not that it'll be a slower recovery on auto sales. — Alan Mulally

The IronClad is faster than most thumb drives but far slower than a standard hard drive. Boot up, application launch and other Windows operations feel sluggish, though still usable. — Barton Gellman

Life is like a foot race, Marcus: There will always be people who are faster than you, and there will always be those who are slower than you. What matters, in the end, is how you ran your race. — Joel Dicker

Sleep came slower than a frigid woman. — Kinky Friedman

Who did you pass on the road?" the King went on, holding out his hand to the Messenger for some more hay.
"Nobody," said the Messenger.
"Quite right," said the King; "this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you."
"I do my best," the Messenger said in a sullen tone. "I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!"
"He can't do that," said the King, "or else he'd have been here first. — Lewis Carroll

Perhaps it was only that I did not feel any crazier than I had ever felt. I did not notice any missing gray tissue, I did not seem to be thinking any slower or more strangely, and so far I'd had no conversations with invisible buddies that I was aware of. Except in my sleep, of course-and did that really count? Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor's children? — Jeff Lindsay

There are only two types of motorists: the idiots who drive slower than me, and the lunatics who go faster. — George Carlin

His militia escorted her up four painful flights of stairs to a great foyer, apologizing the whole way for not considering how difficult stairs would be for her. What they really meant, of course, was that they felt silly and impatient because her pace was so much slower than theirs. — Kameron Hurley

The contamination of drinking water in dense urban settlements did not merely affect the number of V. cholerae circulating through the small intestines of mankind. It also greatly increased the lethality of the bacteria. This is an evolutionary principle that has long been observed in populations of disease-spreading microbes. Bacteria and viruses evolve at much faster rates than humans do, for several reasons. For one, bacterial life cycles are incredibly fast: a single bacterium can produce a million offspring in a matter of hours. Each new generation opens up new possibilities for genetic innovation, either by new combinations of existing genes or by random mutations. Human genetic change is several orders of magnitude slower; we have to go through a whole fifteen-year process of maturation before we can even think about passing our genes to a new generation. — Steven Johnson

Stock exchanges say that more than half of all trades are now executed by just a handful of high-frequency traders, who use rapid-fire computers to essentially force slower investors to give up profits, then disappear before anyone knows what happened. — Charles Duhigg

It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss in all things good; but in all things bad getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of. — Augustus Hare

In those days, I did what was necessary for me to win. This included training with heavy weights: a precursor for injury. So if I could do it over again I'd train with lighter weights, higher reps, no sets below 10 reps, with negatives slower than positives, and avoid injury. If I had done that, my physique wouldn't have been quite as bulky, but with more definition and with less pain. — Frank Zane

Hard work is a sure death but a slower one than starvation. — Jim Hinckley

Nothing is slower than the true birth of a man. — Marguerite Yourcenar

There was a contact between a football player and a cheerleader, male I might add. That male cheerleader clipped me from the side as I was running full speed, or slower than full speed, but generally, in the upper quadrant of speed. And I hit the ground pretty good. — Les Miles

New York always feels more like my hometown than the places where I actually grew up (which weren't far from New York), perhaps because I did my artistic "growing up" while working in this crazy, wonderful city back in my twenties. Although I love the quieter, slower, nature-rich life I live now in the sheep-dotted hills of Devon, there are ways in which I still feel more truly myself here in New York, more than anywhere else. Even after all this time in the desert and on Dartmoor. Strange, isn't it? — Terri Windling

Men are slower to recognize blessings than misfortunes. — Livy

What is it about The Highlands of Scotland? I wondered. The place is desolate, the weather awful, and yet as I looked out of that car window, I could think of no other place on earth where I would rather be. There is something about The Highlands that pulls me in. It's hard to put my finger on it. I think it is one of those rare places on earth that takes me back. It's primitive. Raw. Uncluttered. Time moves slower. Survival becomes more important than the next cell phone call or where the next dollar will come from. — Matthew Taylor

The collective consciousness and all its branches of personal consciousness, through beliefs and thoughts, collide or smash energy, slowing down its vibration to create what we see as the physical world. Our physical reality has no more material substance than a typical belief, thought or dream. It is merely slower vibrating energy. — Russell Anthony Gibbs

We were made to live slower than our fast-paced Western culture deems normal. But it means paddling upstream through strong currents. — Tsh Oxenreider

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster. (Or, sometimes known by] Grove [the head of Intel] giveth and Gates [the head of Microsoft] taketh away.) — Niklaus Wirth

The sea was washing me crosswise and the speed of my strokes pushed me forward, but at a slower pace than the sideways wash. The float that I had tied around my chest was more of a hindrance as it was caught in the tide and floated sideways on the current, it should have been strung out behind me as I swam onwards. This extra effort was making huge demands on my oxygen requirement, I breathed harder and had to avoid intakes of seawater. — Stephen Richards

Walk neither faster nor slower than your own soul. Because it is your soul that will teach you the usefulness of each step you take. — Paulo Coelho

On the Internet, speed matters. According to research by Microsoft, Google, and others, if a website is even 250 milliseconds slower than a rival, people will visit it less often. — Marvin Ammori

Biological neurons operate at a peak speed of about 200 Hz, a full seven orders of magnitude slower than a modern microprocessor (~ 2 GHz). — Nick Bostrom

Time may be a man-made illusion, but it was one that worked at one's inconvenience. When one is urging time to move forward, it will resist and move slowly. When one wants time to go by slower than need be, it goes by on a whim. The only instance where time is at a medium pace is when time isn't even acknowledged at all as an essence to everyday existence. — Lauren Lola

Would you expect a mutiny?' 'Mutiny in the sense of outright revolt and refusal of command? No. But from some of the people I expect muttering, discontent, ill-will; and nothing makes work slower or more inefficient or more unsafe than ill-will and its perpetual quarrels. — Patrick O'Brian

But the fact that, by 2012, one in thirty-five Dutch people sought assisted suicide at their death is not a measure of success. It is a measure of failure. Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end. The Dutch have been slower than others to develop palliative care programs that might provide for it. One reason, perhaps, is that their system of assisted death may have reinforced beliefs that reducing suffering and improving lives through other means is not feasible when one becomes debilitated or seriously ill. — Atul Gawande

Robin Williams is great; it's just like having a conversation when you're doing a scene with him really. It's just so relaxed on the set whenever he's around. Also he's just always telling jokes; he's always on. It must be funny for him though because he must think everyone's brain goes so much slower than his. He's working overtime on all these different ideas that pop into his head. Everyone else must feel miles behind! — Freddie Highmore

The elevator turned out to be slower than the damned train at Disney World. And it played "The Girl from Ipanema" in Muzak. I looked at Paris and saw that he was mouthing the lyrics. That was it. I'd have to plan an intervention for him once we got home. — Leslie Langtry

1. A dragon and a wyvern set out at 2 P.M. from the same cavern, headed in the same direction. The average speed of the dragon is 30 mph slower than twice the speed of the wyvern. In 2 hours, the dragon is 20 miles ahead of the wyvern. Find the flight speed of the dragon, factoring in that the wyvern is bent on revenge. — Anonymous

Children learn much more, far more quickly than adults. Do you know why that is? Because they're open-minded. Because they want to know and they want to learn. Adults, think they know it all. They grow up and forget so easily and instead of opening their minds and developing it they choose what to believe and what not to believe. You can't make a choice on things like that: you either believe or you don't. That's why their learning is slower. They are more cynical, they lose faith and they demend to know things that will help them get by day by day. They've no interest in the extras ... It's the extras that make life. — Cecelia Ahern

In the Carolinas they say "hill people" are different from "flatlands people," and as a native Kentuckian with more mountain than flatlands blood, I'm inclined to agree. This was one of the theories I'd been nursing all the way from San Francisco. Unlike Porterville or Hollister, Bass Lake was a mountain community ... and if the old Appalachian pattern held, the people would be much slower to anger or panic, but absolutely without reason or mercy once the fat was in the fire. Like the Angels, they would tend to fall back in an emergency on their own native sense of justice
which bears only a primitive resemblance to anything written in law books. I thought the mountain types would be far more tolerant of the Angels' noisy showboating, but
compared to their flatlands cousins
much quicker to retaliate in kind at the first evidence of physical insult or abuse. — Hunter S. Thompson

Finish: Even if you run a slower than expected time, you succeed in any marathon when you finish. — Hal Higdon

Consciousness ain't slower than a blink of an eye. — Toba Beta

The long nub end of afternoon spent at her keyboard, her hands moving so much slower than her racing mind, The frustrating lag between her thoughts and the hunt and peck; a hot flood of ideas where there had been months of trickling, uncertain sentences, and Sadie trying to keep up with herself, wishing she'd taken typing in high school, scared that this inspiration would grow restless, impatient with her, and slink back to whatever hole it crawled out of. — Caitlin R. Kiernan

I did some years of therapy and self-realization, and I just move and think at a slower pace - doesn't make me sound very smart! But really not reacting and doing more listening than talking, and letting people say what they need to say, and then maybe not saying anything at all. — Natalie Maines

Nanotechnology has been moving a little faster than I expected, virtual reality a little slower. — Nick Bostrom

Saudi Arabia might proceed toward Sharia slower than Al-Qaeda wants. Al-Qaeda wants pedal-to-the-metal, nothing else in focus, we're heading to Sharia, and the Saudis might not be going there fast enough, so Al-Qaeda hits them. — Rush Limbaugh

No one told me about boys. I had to figure it out myself. The first thing I learned was that sometimes they grow slower than women mentally. — Elena Anaya

The best stories proceed from a mysterious truth-seeking impulse that narrative has when revised extensively; they are complex and baffling and ambiguous; they tend to make us slower to act, rather than quicker. They make us more humble, cause us to empathize with people we don't know, because they help us imagine these people, and when we imagine them - if the storytelling is good enough - we imagine them as being, essentially, like us. If the story is poor, or has an agenda, if it comes out of a paucity of imagination or is rushed, we imagine those other people as essentially unlike us: unknowable, inscrutable, incontrovertible. — George Saunders

The hand is quicker than the eye is,
but somewhat slower than the fly is. — Richard Armour

Place the tip of a stick in a clear brook and you'll see it "bend" underwater because the speed of light is literally slower beneath the surface than it is in air. — David Blatner

Nothing goes down slower than a golf handicap. — Bobby Nichols

His gift is slower than Jane's. It creeps. It will touch us in a few seconds. — Stephenie Meyer

To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the 'music,' but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind's hearing to your ears' natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning. — Peter Senge

If any one of us has had an ambition higher than that of making money; a motive better than that of expediency; a faith warmer than that of reasoning; a love purer than that of the self; he has been slow to express it; still slower to urge it. — Henry Adams

Presumably a movement is more polite than a revolution, and a lot slower. — Linda Ellerbee

I'm slower and some days are better than others, but I'm a fighter. — Richard Pryor

There's been a lot of things said about me
Since that awful day
I'm not the person that I used to be
And that I'll never be the same
That's true - no doubt
But I know more now what life is about
I laugh louder
Cry harder
Take less time to make up my mind
and I
Think smarter
Go slower
I know what I want
And what I don't
I'll be better than I've ever been — David Levithan

Robots can now milk cows. Oil prices have fallen globally, meaning both the petro-states and those indirectly propped up by them are weakened. At the same time, slower growth in China has lately shrunk its voracious appetite for African, Australian, and Latin American commodities. China accounted for more than a third of global growth in recent years, and its growth engine multiplied the growth of many of the countries that exported raw materials to Beijing. That has slowed. China's total debt has grown from roughly 150 percent of its GDP in 2007 to around 240 percent today - a massive increase in one decade that is dampening its growth and its imports and shrinking China's wallet for foreign aid and investment in African and Latin American commodity-exporting countries. In — Thomas L. Friedman

When growth is slower-than-expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up. — Ray Dalio

Some television programs are made very attractive to young children by presenting short, rapidly moving sequences and ever-changing episodes ... Some experts now argue that slower- paced television fare that allows children time to think about the material is more valuable than the faster-paced programs that merely capture their attention. — Sandra Scarr

Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. — Niklaus Wirth

The slower a clock, the nearer it approximated to the infinitely gradual and majestic progression of cosmic time - in fact, by reversing a clock's direction and running it backwards one could devise a time-piece that in a sense was moving even more slowly than the universe, and consequently part of an even greater spatio-temporal system. — J.G. Ballard

When I was a physics major in the late 1970s, my very few fellow female students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined. — Margaret Wertheim

The camera is not only an extension of the eye but of the brain. It can see sharper, farther, nearer, slower, faster than the eye. It can see by invisible light. It can see in the past, present, and future. Instead of using the camera only to reproduce objects, I wanted to use it to make what is invisible to the eye - visible. — Wynn Bullock

So when he touched me, it was deeper and slower than the wildfire, like the flow of molten rock far beneath the surface of the earth. Too deep to feel the heat of it, but it moved inexorably, changing the very foundations of the world with its advance. — Stephenie Meyer

There was something in her black eyes that was as insubstantial as light but at the same time slower and darker than water, slower than anything I had ever seen. It reminded me of one of those moments of sadness that sometimes come when you're waiting for an inconsequential thing, like an elevator or a stop on the subway, and feel a pause that is so still that it seals itself up around you, lifts away from the stream of time, and hangs suspended there. I felt drawn toward her, the way molecules in motion are drawn toward empty spaces. — Kirsten Bakis

A person has all sorts of lags built into him Kesey is saying. Once the most basic is the sensory lag the lag between the time your senses receive something and you are able to react. One-thirtieth of a second is the time it takes if you are the most alert person alive and most people are a lot slower than that ... You can't go any faster than that ... We are all doomed to spend the rest of our lives watching a movies of our lives - we are always acting on what has just finished happening. It happened at least 1 30th of a second ago. We think we are in the present but we aren't. The present we know is only a movies of the past and we will really never be able to control the present through ordinary means. — Tom Wolfe

Millionaires are risk-takers, and they don't become millionaires until they're 40 or 50. It's a slower process than a lot of people think. — Thomas J. Stanley

The projector is giving you exactly what your body needs. Your air sacs are opening up at a slower pace now. This is the amount of oxygen you require to better regulate your system. It's amazing that this is just a piece of cardboard, yet it can have such an effect on you. Why? Because of the power of thought - there is nothing more powerful than the ability to control and send thought. Whenever a new medicine is discovered, I am able to distill its essence and create a projector for it. This — Philip Smith

The wood nymph instructors left me in the dust. They told me not to worry about it. They'd had centuries of practice running away from lovesick gods. But still, it was a little humiliating to be slower than a tree. — Rick Riordan

For the rest of history, for most of us, our bright promise will always fall short of being actualised; it will never earn us bountiful sums of money or beget exemplary objects or organisations ...
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle. — Alain De Botton

The methodological benefits of functional languages are well known [Bac78, Hug89, HJ94], but still the vast majority of programs are written in imperative languages such as C. This apparent contradiction is easily explained by the fact that functional languages have historically been slower than their more traditional cousins, but this gap is narrowing. — Chris Okasaki

I read so slow. If I have a script, I'm going to read it five times slower than any other actor, but I'll be able to tell you everything in it. It kills me that there are standardized tests geared towards just one kind of child. — Channing Tatum

I'm fortunate enough with the surfing to be very much at home at the water - my pulse and heart rate are slower in the water than they are on land. — Ryan Kwanten

Throughout these lectures I have delighted in showing you that the price of gaining such an accurate theory has been the erosion of our common sense. We must accept some very bizarre behavior: the amplification and suppression of probabilities, light reflecting from all parts of a mirror, light travelling in paths other than a straight line, photons going faster or slower than the conventional speed of light, electrons going backwards in time, photons suddenly disintegrating into a positron-electron pair, and so on. That we must do, in order to appreciate what Nature is really doing underneath nearly all the phenomena we see in the world. — Richard Feynman

I have seen slower people than I am and more deliberate ... and even quieter, and more listless, and lazier people than I am. But they were dead. — Mark Twain

As a spiritual person, nature for me has always been a healing place. Going back all the way to my childhood on the farm, the fields and forests were places of adventure and self-discovery. Animals were companions and friends, and the world moved at a slower, more rational pace than the bustling cities where I'd resided my adult life. — David Mixner

When he came down, he was slower, and clutching something his hand. He leapt down the last 5 feet or so and came over to me, uncurling his fingers. In his palm was something trembling and silky and the bright, delicious pale gold of apples; in the gloom of the jungle it looked like light itself. Uva nudged the thing with a finger and it turned over, and I could see it was a monkey of some sort, though no monkey I had ever seen before; it was only a few inches larger than one of the mice I had once been tasked with killing, and his face was a wrinkled black heart, its features pinched together but its eyes large and as blankly blue as a blind kitten's. It had tiny, perfectly formed hands, one of which was gripping its tail, which it had wrapped around itself and which was flamboyantly furred, its hair hanging like a fringe. — Hanya Yanagihara

I don't want to hear about the cardinal again. Because the thing of it is, that cardinal was dead either way, whether he came inside or not. Maybe he knew it, and maybe that's why he decided to crash into the glass a little harder than normal that day. He would have died in here, only slower, because that's what happens when you're a Finch. The marriage dies. The love dies. The people fade away. I — Jennifer Niven