From Otessa Moshfegh's collection of short stories "Homesick for Another World."

p 42--"He was just like me: anything good made him want to die. That's a characteristic some smart people have."

p. 73--"But the spirit of the place mae me think of simpler times, olden days, yore, or whenever it was that people rarely spoke except to say that there was a storm coming or the berries were poisonous or whatnot, the bare essentials... I loved it, or at least I thought I ought to love it--I've never been very clear on that distinction."

p. 102--"The place was full of fat ladies and their men, who looked wrinkled and haggard, heaps of mashed potaoes disappearing under the crooked awnings of their thick mustaches."

p. 164--"The moon was just a sliver, a comma, a single eyelash in the dark, starless sky." Me: it's not easy to come up with a new way to describe the moon, one that jumps out from the page and from all the history of clichés about the moon.

p. 195--"We crossed into Nevada, the blank desert like a spot on a map that had been rubbed away with an eraser." 

p. 204--"The outer length of the thigh, where the muscles separated, and the inside, where the fat spread, were like two sides of a coin I wnated to flip." 

p. 231--A narrator as he sets off on a ridiculous mission to win the heart of a woman he's decided he is in love with after a brief encounter in a furniture market. "Mine was not the usual self-pity, but the kind of fearful admiration one feels watching footage of young tribal boys performing dangerous rites of passage."