Her face was like a snow-covered island upon which rain might fall, but it felt no rain; over which clouds might pass their moving shadows, but she felt no shadow.
He stood and he only had one leg. The other was like a chunk of burnt pine-log he was carrying along as a penance for some obscure sin.
He ran on the white tiles up through the tunnels, ignoring the escalators, because he wanted to feel his feet move, arms swing, lungs clench, unclench, feel his throat go raw with air.
He felt his smile slide away, melt, fold over and down on itself like a tallow skin, like the stuff of a fantastic candle burning too long and now collapsing and now blown out. Darkness. He was not ha...
He felt his body divide itself into a hotness and a coldness, a softness and a hardness, a trembling and a hot trembling, the two halves grinding one upon the other
For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life where October follows September and November touches October and then instead of December and Christ's birth, there is no Bethlehem Star, no rejoi...
Far away, in the meadow, shadows flickered in the Mirror's Maze, as if parts of someone's life, yet unborn, were trapped there, waiting to be lived.
Fantasy? That's for the Fire Birds. Fantasy, even when it takes science-fictional forms, which it often does, is dangerous. It is escapist. It is daydreaming. It has nothing to do with the world and t...
Faber sniffed the book. Do you know that books smell like nutmeg or some spice from a foreign land? I loved to smell them when I was a boy.
Each of the men I have listed seized a bit of the quicksilver of life, froze it for all time and turned, in the blaze of their creativity, to point at it and cry, Isn't this good! And it was good.
Do you ever wonder if--well, if there are people living on the third planet?''The third planet is incapable of supporting life,' stated the husband patiently. 'Our scientists have said there's far too...
Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline!
Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There's all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that.
Death makes everything else sad. But death itself only scares. If there wasn't death, all the other things wouldn't get tainted.
Cuando muere, todo el mundo debe dejar algo detrás, decía mi abuelo. Un hijo, unlibro, un cuadro, una casa, una pared levantada o un par de zapatos. O un jardínplantado. Algo que tu mano tocará de un...
Chapter 31 NOTHING MUCH else happened, all the rest of that night.
But three, now, Christ three A.M.! Doctors say the body's at low tide then. The soul is out. The blood moves slow. You're the nearest to dead you'll ever be save dying. Sleep is a patch of death, but...
But this was like old movies, the silent theater haunted with black-and-white ghosts, silvery mouths opening to let moonlight smoke out, gestures made in silence so hushed you could hear the wind fizz...
Boy,' said Ralph, squinched up, balled up, feet against chest, eyes tight. 'England is no place to be a sinner.
Books were only a receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we would forget.