No dragon can resist the fascination of riddling talk and of wasting time trying to understand it.

I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air, I am he that walks unseen. I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen...

The road goes ever on and on

Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a...

McCutchen knew a demon when he saw one, and he'd burn it out of the Catholic Hills like he'd burned it out of Matamoros years ago.

He looked more dead than many corpses

then Malloy took the gun away from whoever did it.

He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.

She approached me with enough sex appeal to stampede a businessmen's lunch

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights...

In the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince.

The plays he had liked were the one called Measure for Measure, and another one called Macbeth. They were easy to follow, and what happened in them was kind of like what happened in junior high...

Writing a novel—actually picking the words and filling in paragraphs—is a tremendous pain in the ass. Now that TV's so good and the Internet is an endless forest of distraction, it's damn near...

The unqualified truth is, that when I loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often, if not always, that...

Glad to find you so merry, my girls," said a cheery

I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.

I felt that this magical moment would never happen again... I started to experience the vertigo of the cliff and think how easy it would be to drag her into the abyss with me.

Letter writing is a truly anachronistic genre, a sort of tardy inheritance of the eighteenth century; those who lived at that time believed in the pure truth of the written word. And we? Times have...

You will see me, like a mountain animal, bitter little animal

Unsociable even at home and unable to meet the eyes of strangers when she ventured out, Emily made her awkward way across days and years whose bareness appalls her biographers.

South Holding, was the acknowledged leader of the Twenty-ninth Cave, but Summer Camp and

Then she said good night and headed to her room.

WELL, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, the Stella Maris is on her way out of the solar system

I see hundreds of men come by on the road and on the ranches with their bindles on their back and that same damn thing in their heads. Hundreds of them. They come, and they quit and go on; and every...

Is there a better method of departure by night than this quiet bon voyage with an open book, the sole companion who has come to see you off, to wave you into the dark waters beyond language?

I can hear the library humming in the night, a choir of authors murmuring inside their books along the unlit, alphabetical shelves, Giovanni Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son, each one...

Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt.

Romeo: There is thy gold, worse poison to men's souls, doing more murders in this loathsome world, than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell. I sell thee poison; thou hast sold me none....

But in the end, books are not a luxury; they are a necessity. Reading is an addiction!

It was my fifth lie to the police. I was just starting.