The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

The particular hell of watching everyone else succeed while you're still writing.

Every writer I know feels this way about someone else. Writing is such a solitary activity. You have no assurance that what you’re creating has any value, and any indication that you’re behind in the rat race sends you spiraling into the pits of despair. Keep your eyes on your own paper, they say. But that’s hard to do when everyone else’s papers are flapping constantly in your face.

Yellowface · R.F. Kuang

What a wall of forty-three pressed flowers can tell you that the police never could.

After putting down the telephone the eighty-two-year-old birthday boy sat for a long time looking at the pretty but meaningless flower whose name he did not yet know. Then he looked up at the wall above his desk. There hung forty-three pressed flowers in their frames. Four rows of ten, and one at the bottom with four. In the top row one was missing from the ninth slot. Desert Snow would be number forty-four.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo · Stieg Larsson

The particular fury of someone who has never been held accountable.

Rich people, thought Judy—she thought this then, and she thinks it now—generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.

The God of the Woods · Liz Moore