I lie here sleeping, and these people are the fragments of my bloodless dreaming.
I hate being clever, thought the captain, when you don’t really feel clever and don’t want to be clever. To sneak around andmake plans and feel big about making them. I hate this feeling of thinking I...
I don't mind skulls and bones, said Marie. There's nothing even vaguely human to them. I'm not scared of skulls and hones. They're like something insectile. If a child was raised and didn't know he ha...
How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like...
How like a mirror, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who refracted your own light to you? People were more often - he searched for a simile, found one in his work - torches, blazi...
How like a beautiful statue of ice it was, melting in the sun. I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then the Government, seeing how advanta...
Here we all are, said Herb Thompson, taking his cigar out and looking at it reflectively. And life is sure funny. Eh? said Mr. Stoddard. Nothing, except here we are, living our lives, and some place e...
He was not happy. He was not happy. He said the words to himself. He recognized this as the true state of affairs. He wore his happiness like a mask and the girl had run off across the lawn with the m...
He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himselfdark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyeswere two miraculous bits of...
He knew it would take as many years as he could think of now to forget the tracks, no matter how deeply buried. Some morning in autumn, spring, or winter he knew he’d wake and, if he didn’t go near th...
Have you ever watched the jet cars race on the boulevard?...I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly...If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh...
Grandfather's been dead all these years, but if you lifted my skull, by God, in the convolutions of my brain you'd find the big ridges of his thumbprint. He touched me. As I said earlier, he was a scu...
Goodnight! She started her walk. Then she seemed to remember something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. Are you happy? she said?Am I what? he cried.But she was gone - running in...
From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sit...
Four days, eight days, twelve days passed, and he was invited to teas, to suppers, to lunches. They sat talking through the long green afternoons - they talked of art, of literature, of life, of socie...
For there comes a time in the day’s occupations when old Money Writer falls so in love with an idea that he begins to gallop, steam, pant, rave, and write from the heart, in spite of himself. So, too,...
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: school begins. Consider August, a good...
Feel, said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely. Remember how you used to run when you were a kid, and how the wind felt. Like feathers on your arms. You ran and thought any minute you’d fly, but...
Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating. Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? What fun you are missing, then. The fun...
Everyone must leave something behind when he dies...A child or a book or a painting or a...garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when...