• Vesper Flights by Helen Macdonald

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• "This is a borrowed house that we're talking in. It's not my home. / We sit at the table and I don't know where to begin. / I don't know anything about you. / It is hard to ask questions. / You want me to ask questions, because you say it is easier to answer questions than tell your story. I don't want to ask questions, because I think of all the questions you must have been asked before."
• "You say, It was the worst feeling. Then you say it again. The worst feeling. / Several times, you tell me, I see my death. / Then you say it again. I see my death. / The hardest things, I realise, you are saying them all twice."
• "What can a new year mean, when you are young and all you are able to do is wait?"
• "There is a sense that reality is unreliable here, as if I could put a hand to the air and it could slip right through to another universe if I weren't playing sufficient attention, or paying a little too much."
• "The deer drift in and out of the trees like breathing. They appear unexpectedly delicate and cold, as if chill air is pouring from them to the ground to pool into the mist that half obscures their legs and turning flanks."
• "For a while, not much happens. We watch flocks of pigeons clattering about the roofline in shadowless winter light. My face grows numb with cold."
• "Look at yourself, says the DVC, cutting through all that is quotidian, cutting it all away. Look at yourself. Here you really are. The old dramatists called that moment of self-understanding anagnorisis."