When the last autumn of Dickens's life was over, he continued to work through his final winter and into spring. This is how all of us writers give away the days and years and decades of our lives in e...
The day before the Queen's Ball, Father had a visitor--a very young girl with literary aspirations, someone Lord Lytton had recommended visit Father and sent over–and while Father was explaining to he...
Thomas Blanky wondered if he had been an instrument of evil — or perhaps just of folly — when he had used his more than three decades of ice-master skills to get 126 men the impossible 250 miles throu...
She [Beatrice] alone was still real for him, still implied meaning in the world, and beauty. Her nature became his landmark - what Melville would call, with more sobriety than we can now muster, his G...
Francis Crozier now understood that the most desirable and erotic thing a woman could wear were the many modest layers such as Sophia Cracroft wore to dinner in the governor's house, enough silken fab...
They lay together in a sheltered place among the ruins of Brasilia while deathbeams from Chinese EMVs played like blue searchlights on broken ceramic walls.
Francis Crozier believes in nothing. . It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persu...
The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer
Outside the port, the slashed rock of the unnamed asteroid tumbled and spun in dynamics known only to the gods of chaos mathematics.
Mobs have passions, not brains.
My intellect was my greatest vanity.
Life is brutal that way... the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.
I take my favorite and most promising lads to the theater, said [Sherlock] Holmes. I'd say that if they were born into better circumstances many would have grown up to be MP’s, but in truth most are t...
She would follow him there. And she would die there -- and die soon. Of misery and of strangeness and of all the vicious, petty, alien, and unbridled thoughts that would pour into her like the poison...
Reading your sonnets? asked Orphu. Mahnmut closed the book. How’d you know? Have you taken up telepathy now that you’ve lost your eyes? Not yet, rumbled the Ionian. Orphu’s great crab shell was lashed...
The words sounded like a mournful incantation.
He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the...
Poco después del enorme éxito de La mujer de blanco, se me preguntó cuál era el secreto de mi éxito; yo, modestamente, le dije a mi interlocutor:1. Busca una idea central.2. Idea unos personajes.3. De...
Si un escritor se pone muy enfermo, todo se detiene. Si se muere, su negocio se acaba para siempre. En este sentido, la carrera de un escritor popular se parece más a la de un famoso actor, pero hasta...
The beauty of that June day was almost staggering. After the wet spring, everything that could turn green had outdone itself in greenness and everything that could even dream of blooming or blossoming...
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