Looking for Alaska

“I thought about the slow process of becoming bone and then fossil and then coal that will, in millions of years, be mined by humans of the future, and how they would heat their homes with her, and then she would be smoke billowing out of a smokestack, coating the atmosphere. I still think that, sometimes, think that maybe ‘the afterlife’ is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable. Maybe she was just matter, and matter gets recycled.”

Looking for Alaska, pp. 219-20
By John Green
Published 2005

Sisterland

“On average, an earthquake of magnitude 6 or greater happens somewhere in the world every three days. Mostly, they happen underwater, and we hardly take notice. It is only when the earthquake comes to us, upending the streets and houses and trees we think of as ours, that they command our attention. But the earth…is always busy.”

Sisterland, pp. 389-90
By Curtis Sittenfeld
Published 2013