In summer he was a different person, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years; but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tire...
I thought you said something about a wolf' I began.'Yes. That black beast that gnaws at my bones whenever he gets a chance. He loiters in corners and behind doors most of the time, because he's afraid...
I see, she said softly, nodding her head as though she really did. Well, it’s your business, of course. She turned her hand in her lap and stared into her damaged palm. You are at liberty to say nothi...
Her eyes were too full of beauty to leave room for anything so mundane as intelligence.
For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist. I have peeped shamelessly into hearts and bathroom closets. I have leaned over shoulders to follow the...
For it looked as if the walls were simply dissolving in the rain; those stones still standing, pale and insubstantial as rice paper, seemed ready to melt away under my very eyes if I just stood there...
For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.The hours between eight in the evening and one or two in the morning have always been my magic hours. Against the blue candlewick bed...
Fate, at first so amenable, so reasonable, so open to negotiation, ends up by exacting a cruel revenge for happiness.
Even the furniture made the most of the lack of supervision to move about.
At first the boys were puzzled by illness. They looked at their father from the other side of a wall of pain, bewildered that their father stood writing in his book, when he had only to reach over the...
As we drove into Harrow-gate, the atmosphere in the car was heavy with Miss Winter’s oppressive silence.
Anyone would think you’d seen a ghost!
And yet I cannot shake off my misgivings. Even now I can picture her face—so innocent in appearance, so distressed at being accused—and I am forced to wonder, is there some additional factor at play h...
The price they must pay for escaping their destiny.
Stood with my hand on the handle of the third door. The rule of three, Miss Winter had said. But I wasn’t in the mood for her story anymore. Her dangerous house with its indoor rain and trick mirror h...
Myself, I found that my thoughts had been rearranged in my absence.
Earl, his mother a black servant girl—had brought
As though if I looked hard enough, there would be revealed in the grain or the watermark of the paper itself the elucidation of the mystery.
What makes it noteworthy is that a striking coincidence has made it a cleverer trick than they could have known. For the book is a rather silly story about a governess and two haunted children. I am a...
What better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?