The poet’s insight into the unchanging spirit of humanity.… Insight was a good word. My father was great on insight. I had lived with him for twenty years and I ought to know. His intimate understandi...
The other Dona was dead too, and this woman who had taken her place was someone who lived with greater intensity, with greater depth, bringing to every thought and every action a new richness of feeli...
The only time I got into trouble was when I forged M's signature on the weekly report we had to take home every Friday and take back to school again signed by one of our parents. The reason I did so w...
The house was a sepulcher, our fear and suffering lay buried in the ruins. There would be no resurrection.
The fall was followed by a wail of anguish, penetrating to the dressing room behind. See to baby, Truda, Mama must have said, cool and composed, knowing that if the child had been crushed beneath the...
The air was full of their scent, sweet and heady, and it seemed to me as though their very essence had mingled with the running waters of the stream, and become one with the falling rain and the dank...
That was yesterday. Today we pass on, we see it no more, and we are different, changed in some infinitesimal way. We can never be quite the same again.
That this exceptionally scholarly man whose judgments, always rich and sensitive, though sometimes austere, should have embarked on an intensely romantic retelling of the old Cornish legend of that fa...
That corner in the drive, too, where the trees encroach upon. . . the gravel, is not a place in which to pause, not after the sun has set. When the leaves rustle, they sound very much like the stealth...
Swiftly we covered the ground, far too swiftly, I thought, far too easily, and the callous countryside watched us with indifference. We came to the bend in the road that I had wished to imprison as a...
Slaughter on a scale far greater than any attempted by the Paris mob was the portion of those village patriots who dared to resist them. Women and children were not spared, men were thrown, while stil...
Sir,’ or whatever one does say to God, ‘here I am, Maria, and I am the lowest form of life,’ that would be honest. And honesty counts for something, doesn’t it? One doesn’t know, said Niall. That’s th...
She sipped her glass of water, crooking her finger, smiling at Maria. I can’t make up my mind, thought Niall, whether Polly is a criminal, cunning and dangerous, ripe for the Old Bailey; or just so bl...
She had contemplated life so long it had become indifferent to her.
People who travel are always fugitives.
Once there had been a path across the mountains, and restlessness, and an urge to fight, and a dream of many women, and now there was a home that was my home, and peace, and relaxation, and no dreams...
Often rebuked, yet always back returning To those first feelings that were born with me, And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning For idle dreams of things which cannot be; I’ll walk, but not in...
Now you are here, let me show you everything, she said, her voice ingratiating and sweet as honey, horrible, false, I know you want to see it all, you've wanted to for a long time, and you were too sh...
No human being could live in this wasted country, thought Mary, and remain like other people; the very children would be born twisted, like the blackened shrubs of broom, bent by the force of a wind t...
Never dance again? said Niall. But what would happen? What would everybody do? Nothing would happen, she said. The theater is a funny world, you know. They forget one very soon.