And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems ev...
Don't we all have a certain number of images that stay around in our head, which we undoubtedly call memories and improperly so, and which we can never get rid of because they return in our sky with the regularity of a comet - torn away also from a w...
I read somewhere that spiders can spin silk strong enough to hold the weight of a thousand trucks. I tried to imagine those lines of silver, thinner than air, stronger than steel. Sometimes I think that a hundred webs, invisible gossamers, connect Gr...
Love at first sight is a hypnosis: I am fascinated by an image: at first shaken, electrified, stunned, "paralysed" as Menon was by Socrates, the model of loved objects, of captivating images, or again converted by an apparition, nothing distinguishin...
you cannot be friends either with boy or man unless you give yourself away in the process, and Mr. Pembroke did not commend this. He, for “personal intercourse,” substituted the safer “personal influence,” and gave his junior hints on the set...
She was sewing together the little proofs of his devotion out of which to make a garment for her tattered love and faith. He cut into the faith with negligent scissors, and she mended and sewed and rewove and patched. He wasted, and threw away, and c...
My cousin Rebecca teaches comparative English literature at Midlands College. She’s always seeing Austen in the world around her.” “Exactly.” Theresa beamed. “Life is easier to understand when you think of it in terms of Pride and Prejudice...
Now bound by the sudden rush of emotion that reverberates through me as I remain intent on awakening Nadia, I push my fingertips upward over her neck as if pushing a coin from the edge of heaven, waiting to catch where it falls as if I were in all pl...
Dating is all about getting to know somebody, without wasting a lot of time or money. What is the price of love? You’ve got the cost of dinner, a movie, and cab fare for you and your date, as well as the entire film crew documenting your evening. S...
Captain Smek himself appeared on television for an official speech to humankind. [...] 'Noble Savages of Earth,' he said. 'Long time we have tried to live together in peace.' (It had been five months.) 'Long time have the Boov suffered under the host...
Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their...
The exegesis Fat labored on month after month struck me as a Pyrrhic victory if there ever was one -- in this case an attempt by a beleaguered mind to make sense out of the inscrutable. Perhaps this is the bottom line to mental illness: incomprehensi...
I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest ...
She remembered one of her boyfriends asking, offhandedly, how many books she read in a year. "A few hundred," she said. "How do you have the time?" he asked, gobsmacked. She narrowed her eyes and considered the array of potential answers in front of ...
It was too familiar to Cody. He placed his arms around his wife trying somehow to shelter her from the reality she was facing. There was another reason for his closeness; his desperation to show her he was not one of them, that the tribes of cruel me...
When we neared the orchard a flock of birds lit from its outer rows. They hadn't been there long. The branches shook with their absent weight and the birds circled above in the riddy mackerel sky, where they made an artless semaphore. I was afraid, I...
In the end Navidson is left with one page and one match. For a long time he waits in darkness and cold, postponing this final bit of illumination. At last though, he grips the match by the neck and after locating the friction strip sparks to life a f...
Once it happens you can’t remember how you started out: innocent, barreling into the tunnel, shooting out at each station like a dolphin out of a dim green pool. Pneumatic doors inhale open, puff shut, lock with a solid thump. Up and down the line,...
It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowball. the best way to put it is that I have no particul...
Life is like a Tick mark. it is stable for a time. then it takes a ditch not because we are meant to be upset but to go higher and be better, you need to lean back and jump. life is like a ANalog signal it have its highs and lows. i take it as 1st cy...
The room was two-tiered, its marble balconies filled with rams and water nymphs in fancy dress; a kaleidoscope of colours swayed in time to the beat of hypnotic music. A concerto of absent musicians, it played only in her mind. The numerous chandelie...
