There was something strangely peaceful about the house, something very rare and difficult to define. It was like a house in an old tale, discovered by the hero one evening in midsummer. In the tale th...
There was no yesterday and no tomorrow; fear had been slung aside, and shame forgotten. We were all together—Pappy and Mama; Maria and Niall and Celia—we were all happy, with so many people looking at...
The waiters were getting tired, and very bored. The Head Waiter came again and pushed the bill on a plate, neatly folded, under Pappy’s eyes. What’s this? said Pappy. Somebody want my autograph? Who’s...
The trouble is, the children have no imagination. They are sweet, and have carefree, honest eyes; but they have not any magic in their day. The magic has all gone…
The spaniel came up to me, sniffing at my legs, and I bent down and stroked his ears. Well, Micky, I said, you surely remember me? Poor old Micky, good old Micky. Micky has got very fat, said my mothe...
The smell of coffee, white dust, tobacco and burnt bread, flowers with a fragrance of wine, and the crimson fruit, soft and overripe. A girl looking over her bare shoulder, with a flash of a smile, go...
The relief was tremendous. I did not feel sick anymore. The pain had gone...I had no idea I was so empty.
The people don’t want to be understood, it would spoil their sense of injustice. They revel in their wrongs
The glass world was unique, a law unto itself. It had its own rules and customs, and a separate language too, handed down not only from father to son but from master to apprentice, instituted heaven k...
The child destined to be a writer is vulnerable to every wind that blows. Now warm, now chill, next joyous, then despairing, the essence of his nature is to escape the atmosphere about him, no matter...
Take care, my father used to say, when first instructing Robert in the art of blowing glass. Control is of supreme importance. One false movement and the expanding glass will be shattered. I remember...
Tact was a quality unknown to her, discretion too, and because gossip was the breath of life to her this stranger must be served for her dissection.
Suddenly I saw a clearing in the dark drive ahead, and a patch of sky, and in a moment the dark trees had thinned, the nameless shrubs had disappeared, and on either side of us was a wall of colour, b...
Something within each one of us had been awakened that we had not known was there; some dream, desire, or doubt, flickered into life by that same rumor, took root, and flourished. We were none of us t...
So death, Shelagh decided, was a moment for compliments, for everyone saying polite things about everybody else which they would not dream of saying at another time.
She's dearer than life itself, that's all I know.
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty one. They are so full of li...
At twenty-three it takes very little to make the spirits soar.
A dreamer, I walked enchanted, and nothing held me back.
We can never go back again, that much is certain. The past is still too close to us. The things we have tried to forget and put behind us would stir again,