I leaned agains the warm brick wall and gazed up. It was a bright, cloudless day, the sky a mocking blue. It was the kind of day when children ran up and down the streets and shouted, when couples wal...
I didn't move. I've learned from years of experience that dogs and falcons and ladies come back to you if you stay where you are.
He could not tell all of the California pines apart, the gray pine from the coulter, the bushop from the knobcone and the Monterey.
Twenty-first-century attitudes towards time and our expectations of story are very different from the shape of Mary Anning’s life. She spent day after day, year after year, doing the same thing on the...
This was the sort of situation that she read about in the novels she favored, by authors such as Miss Jane Austen, whom Margaret was sure she’d met long ago at the Assembly Rooms the first time we vis...
People had gone west leaving behind all sorts of trouble; what they found in California was the space and freedom to create new trouble.
Lick your lips, Griet.I licked my lips.Leave your mouth open.I was so surprised by this request that my mouth remained open of its own will. I blinked back tears. Virtuous women did not open their mou...
I never said I didn't want to marry. It just didn't happen-Iam not the sort of lady a man chooses to marry, for I am too plain and too serious. Now I am reconciled to being on my own.
I heard voices outside our front door - a woman's, bright as polished brass, and a man's, low and dark like the wood of the table I was working on. They were the kind of voices we heard rarely in our...
His parting would have been solemn but we were too busy to think much of it. We were weaving fourteen hours a day then, with hardly a moment for meals, and I was dizzy with the pattern of the tapestry...
I wanted to wear the mantle and the pearls. I wanted to know the man who painted her like that.
I missed the currency of ideas. In London we had been part of a wide circle of solicitors’ families, and social occasions had been mentally stimulating as well as entertaining.
I knew that he would go out to the tavern, returning with eyes like glittering spoons.
I felt as if my parents had pushed me into the street, that a deal had been made and I was being passed into the hands of a man. At least he is a good man, I thought, even if his hands are not as clea...
I could not think of anything but his fingers on my neck, his thumb on my lips.
Funny, I didn't think much about apples fore we came to the Black Swamp. when I was growin up we had an orchard like everybody else but I didn't pay it no attention cept when the blossom was out in Ma...
Elle se sentait tellement déconcertée par la contradiction existant entre ce qu'elle pensait et ce qu'on espérait d'elle qu'elle était incapable de parler. Peut-être valait-il mieux qu'elle se taise,...
But dying was no drama. Dying was cold and hard and painful, and dull. It went on too long. I was exhausted and growing bored with it. Now I had too much time to think about whether I was going to die...
Although we kept the door ajar so that we could hear, we could not see beyond the gentlemen standing in front of the door in the crowded room. I felt trapped behind a wall of men that separated me fro...
A firefly landed on Honor’s sleeve and began walking up her shoulder, its tail still blinking. As she craned her neck to look down at it, Jack chuckled. Don’t be scared. It’s just a lightning bug. He...