I always measured distances in songs. I measured everything in songs.

For weeks she had behaved as though she were the only person to have ever had a nervous breakdown.

I have become Japanese and I am no longer a Welshwoman.

It happened so quickly. The End.

Yes, there was a shadow there.

Dan believed it had all started going wrong when they took away his keys.

Food banks are one of the country’s main industries now; having replaced actual banks, who fled the island like rats from a sinking ship.

I heard that their overflowing hormones made them dangerously seductive.

Caught off guard, we were laughably weak.

It's not very clear to me if he was asking for help or wanting me to leave them alone.

Perhaps I’m not ready yet to plan out my entire future, but right now these are the arms I need around me.

Oh, Master Song, who would have guessed your heart was hard as steel?

This night sealed, consecrated, my future as a writer absolutely.

I had two choices: I could wrest back control of my life or I could die.

I guzzle the wine and ask him if he likes women now.

These kids could be just clever, fancy thugs.

He still loves her, so he complies. He runs the simulation all over again.

They’ve taken care of the medical expenses ever since “posthumous” became synonymous with “posthuman.”

Inside it floated a tiny infant, in every way like a human being, except for its minuscule, as yet featherless, wings.

I huddled in sorrow beside the warmth of my wound.

In this excerpt from 2019 Man Booker International winner Jokha Alharthi's novel Bitter Orange Tree, an Omani student dredges up her grandmother’s troubled past and grows entangled in the personal dilemmas of her fellow international students.

Nothing can force me to go on living beneath Hermaphroditus’s long shadow—one half wearing the other, half a woman leaning on half a man.

We were five minutes out on our jeep when the sound of an explosion big enough to shake the car resounded from behind us.

Days before my dad set the house on fire, there was a sheet drying bit by bit.

I would have ironed my own hands had I not needed them to iron.

It was impossible to talk to a dead man, so I talked to her instead.

The hearth is a fire that’s always being extinguished.

When did you agree to live like a widow before your time?

Nobody couldn’t have a belly button.

And why couldn’t you get Cen to talk while she was asleep, anyway?

I knew better than anyone else that Oh was not gay, that he was just using these rumors.

But what did a baby have to show for its life?

The sun rose over the mountaintop in a blaze of blue and green and so the day began.

He said, this is real, and then he pulled up his shirt and showed us the scars under his arm.

One wrong move and somebody was bound to shout, “Watch yourself! You’re in Iran now.

I went to Iraq to make a queer film the likes of which the world had never seen.

They were the hands of someone who had never heard of hand cream.

Even after the credits stopped rolling and the blue government warning turned into a blizzard of static, Katsuya kept staring at the screen, a vague grin on his face.

My reticence and my incompetence troubled me more than my appearance, but most intolerable was my unluckiness.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I didn’t know. Ignorance is a kind of blindness.”

She was furious! She grew silent again, went upstairs, and searched the nightstand. The pistol was there.

“But there’s no one who doesn’t know Sadai Sadygly. You see, no one else in the world has played Hamlet, Othello, Aidyn, and Kefli Iskender like he has.”

The clown had put the platter of coke on his head, like a waiter carrying a tray.

The passion and blind devotion are no longer. The ending is near.

I had just finished reading Francoise Sagan’s Bonjour Tristesse and he had imagined me as Odile from André Maurois’ Climats.

He said it was politics disguised as debauchery.

Does he know I intend to murder him?

Four writer/translator teams work together to create a single story in multiple languages.

It would be difficult to find a single man whose back had not been scarred by the whip of the thakur or his agents.

When I bought this aquarium I didn't realize I was preparing my own casket.

Although his name wasn’t Gujji to begin with, he was Gujji now.

These were not the eyes of a dog.

“Damn it! What the hell is going on?”

We are here to teach, not to meddle in the affairs of other people.”

“There must be a misunderstanding.

He has never looked less like a potential father.

“I’ve been dreaming about this all my life, to kiss the Little Dipper.

He swam through the thick white sea and he could no longer feel his heart.

Love has been a tightrope lately.

Behind them were twenty, thirty, maybe even fifty babies.