By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Claire Messud, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more. Happy endings are famously rare in literature. We turn to great books for emotional and ethical complexity, and broad-scale resolution cheats our sense of what real life is like.
Modifiers are words, phrases, and clauses that add information about other parts of a sentence-which is usually helpful. But when modifiers aren't linked clearly enough to the words they're actuall...