Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Familes are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Imp...
However, in ordinary life, one cannot live by such principles. Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free...
His confidences, this mist, had led us unexpectedly onto a peninsula of intimacy, and I found myself on the brink of telling what I had never told anyone before. The words flew ready-formed into my he...
He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn't tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less.
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, the weight an...
Emmeline didn’t call me anything. She didn’t need to, for I was always there. You only need names for the absent.
Emmeline and Adeline. Unmistakable. Two manes of red hair, two pairs of black shoes; one child in the navy poplin that the Missus had put Emmeline in that morning, the other in green.
But silence is not a natural environment for stories. They need words. Without them they grown pale, sicken and die. And then they haunt you.
But she had that laugh, and the sound of it was so beautiful that when you heard it, it was as if your eyes saw her through your ears and she was transformed.
Boys do not leave their boyhood behind when they leave off their school uniform.
Turquoise-and-green cloth that cloaked her body did not soften the rigidity of her frame. Her bright copper hair had been arranged into an elaborate confection of twists, curls and coils. Her face, as...
Tightly drawn into a mask of endurance.
The joys of coauthoring a research paper, it is really time to go to bed.
The house picked up again its long, slow project of decay.
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...
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.
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.
What succor, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? When the lightning strikes shad...
What are your favorite books? What do you dream about? Whom do you love?
Tragedy alters everything.