After all, it is fairy tales the world wants. Real life is all the 'real life' we want. Give us something better in books.

The sun was setting over Rainbow Valley. The pond was wearing a wonderful tissue of purple and gold and green and crimson. A faint blue haze rested on the eastern hill, over which a great, pale, round...

Such presumption, said Aunt Laura, meaning for a Dix to aspire to a Murray. It wasn't because of his presumption I packed him off, said Emily. It was because of the way he made love. He made a thing...

Anne has as many shades as a rainbow and every shade is the prettiest while it lasts.

Don't you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?

Tell me... is there really no other way for you but this? To kneel down forever before an army of boys for just five dirty minutes in the dark? Think... of the men who have kneled before you while you...

It doesn't do any good to fight with Sonny. Sonny just moves back, inside himself, where he can't be reached.

Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no...

The last I saw of him was of a dark blue back marching towards Shaftesbury Avenue; eternally the victor in a war where the losers win.

They were up past dawn, crashed, were granted absolution in its secular manifestation of late checkout.

She doesn't believe in dogs, Bridget said. Dogs are hardly an article of faith, Sylvie said.

We have been married a little over a year and already there is a terrible silence around some subjects. We never speak of the disappearance of my brothers — a stranger listening to us would think it...

I have seen statues that would look stodgy beside her, I have seen painted Madonnas whose features would be coarse beside her pale luminous loveliness.

A plot, whether abandoned by a reader or pursued rapturously, remains itself, and gets where it is headed even if nobody is looking.

Oh, the accident necessary to fiction!

January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester's bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not...

Love was supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity.

Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or...

Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell...

Possibility, infinity, beauty - - none of those words were right. {...} What he really wanted to say was: have you felt this? this phantom life streaking like a phosphorescent hound at the edges of...

Passion is sweeter split strand by strand.

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:...

There was a star riding through clouds one night, & I said to the star, 'Consume me'.

Father O'Neil was putting hymnals in the backs of the pews when Puller and Knox walked in. Knox crossed herself as they walked up the aisle.

According to our Tang dynasty poet Du Fu, people do not write well when they are happy. If you are content with life, you simply want to enjoy it.

If you memorize three hundred Tang poems, you might be able to write a little.

He's a bully. I love bullies. They have such big, shiny red buttons to push.

LeCedrick Earle was maybe an inch shorter than me, with dark glossy skin and a shaved head. He was wearing a prison - issue orange jumpsuit and Keds. I said, That's right. I work for an attorney named...

Still the strange ships glittered and shone, and this led to some discussion as to what they might be made of. The Admiral thought perhaps iron or steel. Metal ships indeed! The French are, as I have...