Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would...

Taking a breath, I stepped into the line to find him standing right where I'd left him, smiling with his hand extended.

You look like the vamp who bled the cat.

Some things are too good. They make everything else worthless.

LATER THAT DAY, in the evening, Nadia's time, the sun having slipped below her horizon, it was morning in the San Diego, California, locality of La Jolla, where an old man lived by the sea, or rather...

When he died he would not end. The world would end.

Mr. Phileas Fogg lived, in 1872, at No. 7, Saville Row, Burlington Gardens, the house in which Sheridan died in 1814. He was one of the most noticeable members of the Reform Club

There were men and women who appeared as fluid as ghosts, they could have been attending a burial out of curiosity, merely to recall how it had been when they were buried.

Theresa strode over to us in a swish of cloth. "Enough of this, animator. He can't do it, so he pays the price. Either leave now, or join us at our... feast." Are you having rare Who - roast - beast?"...

My chalice intoxicates me.

Reading was like visiting distant friends.

Rivera rubbed his temples. Satan told you to do it? he said wearily. No. Elvis? I told you, it's supernatural.

Blessed are the meek, for to them we shall say "Beautiful boys."

I visualized myself at Norma's house, stretched out on her couch, my eyes closed, and she at the piano playing a powerful movement from some Symphony in D major by Beethoven, by Brahms, by Sibelius,...

Actually, he hadn't just complained; she'd come home from school one afternoon and found him stabbing his paperback edition with a steak knife, the tip of the blade penetrating the cover and sinking...

Words are immortal - Elinor

Didn't books say that too: that there is always a price to pay for happiness?

My name is Hadrian Blackwater.

At the core of this movement were Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullan, Nella Larsen, Jessie Remon Fauset, Jean Toomer, Arna Bontemps, and Zora Neale Hurston.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis {we all have to choose our role models, as...

We should poison him," Savannah said. "Why do you always want to poison people?" Dugas asked her. "I don't want to poison people. I want to poison d'Ambray."

Also, your father.

For me, reading was adventure, but most of all, reading was escape -

Somewhere embedded in every ordinary book are the five or six words for which really all the rest will be written.

Truth, of course, must of necessity be stranger than fiction, for we have made fiction to suit ourselves.

It is not all books that are as dull as their readers. There are probably words addressed to our condition exactly, which, if we could really hear and understand, would be more salutary than the...

The Countess was very good company and not really the featherhead she seemed; all one had to do with her was to observe the simple condition of not believing a word she said.

Dawn unlocked the morning in increments of gray.

and the characters are all invented as to their psychological evolution, though some are based upon those of real persons easily identifiable in that narrative. The drama is that of the actual events...

A sprinkle of last-minute despair gives a soul an agreeably earthy aftertaste.