Hanya Yanagihara
- The People in the Trees
As I grew older, I came to realize that death had been easy for my mother; to fear death, you must first have something to tether you to life. But she had not. It was as if she had been preparing for her death the entire time I knew her. One day she was alive; the next, not. And as Sybil said, she was lucky. For what more could we presume to ask from death - but kindness?
Hanya Yanagihara
- The People in the Trees
Beautiful people make even those of us who proudly consider ourselves unmoved by another's appearance dumb with admiration and fear and delight, and struck by the profound, enervating awareness of how inadequate we are, how nothing, not intelligence or education or money, can usurp or overpower or deny beauty.
Marina Warner
- From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers
The genre's need of an audience forces the teller to enter that audience's economy of beliefs; the memory of its oral origin makes fairy tale long to please. The sultan is always there, half asleep, but quite awake enough to rouse himself and remember that death sentence he threatened. In the kingdom of fiction, the tension between speaking out and staying silent never ceases.
