Then he looked beyond the ever-shifting alteration to study the stillness of her expression. He knew his camera could not capture this - that some things were only truly seen by the human eye. This wa...
The world of the almanac was a queer one. In the real world, families branched like trees, blood mixed by marriage passed from one generation to the next, making an ever-wider net of connections. Titl...
The storyteller gave me a sideways look. Miss Lea, it doesn't do to get attached to these secondary characters. It's not their story. They come and go, and when they're gone, they're gone for good. Th...
Silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words.
She made her resolution. In for a penny, in for a pound.
Rose waited for the night to bring her the same comfort. It didn't. Her mother was dead...she was now too exhausted to sleep -- and too heartbroken to weep.
Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then I was born...Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that...
Once upon a time there was a fairy godmother, but the rest of the time there was none. This story is about one of those other times.
Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmeline. That told me that she had survived the fire, at least. And on the second line, the name I had been hoping for. Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, for...
Miss Winter restored to me the virginal qualities of the novice reader, and then with her stories she ravished me.
I shall start at the beginning. Though of course, the beginning is never where you think it is.
I pushed my pile of papers to one side, stroked Shadow and stared into the fire, longing for the comfort of a story where everything had been planned well in advance, where the confusion of the middle...
I made a resolution to telephone my mother the next day, but it was a safe resolution; no one can hold you to a decision made in middle of the night.And then my spine sent me an alarm. A presence. Her...
I looked out into the dead garden. Against the fading light, my shadow hovered in the glass, looking into the dead room. What did she make of us? I wondered. What did she think of our attempts to pers...
I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the sh...
He had given up trying to make her believe only what was true, she had been raised to the kind of religion that could admit no difference between what was true and what was good.
He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and d...
For nearly sixty years I have eavesdropped with impunity on the lives of people who do not exist.
Don’t you think one can tell the truth much better with a story?
Don't be so polite. If there's one thing I can't abide, it's politeness.