Being nice is what’s left when you’ve failed at everything else. People with ambition don’t give a damn what other people think about them.
Why do they spend their time with cows when they are surely the more natural companions to unicorns, griffins and dragons? The answer is that the rook lives as he wishes. When he wants the entertainme...
When one is nothing, one invents. It fills a void.
When I was a child, books were everything. And so there is in me, always, a nostalgic yearning for the lost pleasure of books. It is not a yearning that one ever expects to be fulfilled. And during th...
What unnerved me more than all the rest were her sunglasses. I could not see her eyes but, as I remembered the inhuman green irises from the poster, her dark lenses seemed to develop the force of a se...
What is it that allows human beings to see through each other's pretendings? For I understood quite clearly in that moment that she was anxious. Perhaps emotions have a smell or taste; perhaps we tran...
What better place to kill time than a library? And for me, what better way to get to know someone than through her choice and treatment of books?
We turned into the rose garden where the pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrounded them in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the...
We live like latecomers at the theatre; we must catch up as best we can, dividing the beginning from the shape of later events.
Vida Winter's appearance was not calculated for concealment. She was an ancient queen, sorceress or goddess. Her stiff figure rose regally out of a profusion of fat purple and red cushions. Draped aro...
Una mente fatigada tiende a tomar derroteros infructuosos; no hay nada que una buena noche de sueño no pueda reparar.
Tributaries A river on a map is a simple thing. Our river starts at Trewsbury Mead, and follows a course of some two hundred and thirty-six miles to reach the sea at Shoeburyness. But anyone who takes...
To make it true? Was it for me or for her that he made these thankless efforts to connect us? It was an impossible task.
Time was of the essence. For at eight o’clock the world came to an end. It was reading time.
Time was of the essence. 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. Again...
This was one of the images of his lifetime. He simply exposed his retina and let love burn her flickering, shimmering, absorbed face onto his soul.
Thinking about it now, I realize that the mark had more or less the form of a Q, but at the time, in the shock of this unexpected and painful act of revealment, it had no such clarity, and it disturbe...
They were like amputees, only it was not a limb they were missing, but their very souls.
There was nothing to see; the mist that hung in the air made everything invisible that was more than a short distance away.
There was no rational explanation for what she had seen. It was unscientific. And Hester knew the world was totally and profoundly scientific. There could be only one explanation. I must be mad, she w...