Stories last longer: but only by becoming only stories.

Oh God how subtle he would have to be, how cunning… No paragraph, no phrase even of the thousands the book must contain could strike a discordant note, be less than fully imagined, an entire...

They called him John Storm: John after his grandfather, but Storm after his father and his mother.

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter’s place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he...

Violet said nothing, though big pearly tears, like a child’s, trembled at her lashes. She suddenly missed John very much. Into him she could pour all the inarticulate perceptions, all the knowings and unknowings she...

Almost as soon as it was lit it began to sound as though it were running down, but in fact it would continue to run down for a long time. He knew the feeling.

When he was in college, a famous poet made a useful distinction for him. He had drunk enough in the poet’s company to be compelled to describe to him a poem he was thinking of....

The better you tell an old story, the more you are talking about right now.

God, he thought, her eyes are so bright, flashing, deep, full of promise, all those things eyes are in books but never are in life, and she was his.

Novelty. Security. Novelty wouldn’t be a bad title. It had the grandness of abstraction, alerting the reader that large and thoughtful things were to be bodied forth. As yet he had no inkling of any...

I could be listening to Painted Red weave the stories of the saints in her rich roomy voice, and beginning to see how all those stories were in some way one story: a simple story...

Novelty and Security: the security of novelty, the novelty of security. Always the full thing, the whole subject, the true subject, stood just behind the one you found yourself contemplating. The trick, but it wasn’t...

path is only a name for a place where you find yourself. Where you’re going on it is only a story. Where you’ve been on it is only another. Some of the stories are pleasant...

Seen from inside the bar, the avenue, the stores opposite, the street glimpsed going off at right angles, the trapezoid of sky visible above the lower buildings, are altered by the tinted windows into an...

It must take a lot of self-discipline,’ she said.’Oh, I don’t know. I don’t have much.’ He felt himself about to say again, and unable to resist saying, that ‘Dumas, I think it was Dumas,...

Learning to decipher words had only added to the pleasures of holding spines and turning pages, measuring the journey to the end with a thumb-riffle, poring over frontispieces. Books! Opening with a crackle of old...

Do you write every day?’ ‘Oh, no. Oh, I sort of try. I don’t work very hard, really. Really I’m on vacation. All the time. Or you could say I work all the time, too....

Divorced?”Separated.’He tested his thumb against the pricks of the rose. ‘Women. They say you got all the freedom. Then you give them their freedom, and they don’t want it.’ (“Novelty”)

She had always lived her best life in dreams. She knew no greater pleasure than that moment of passage into the other place, when her limbs grew warm and heavy and the sparkling darkness behind...

There was after all no mystery in the end of love, no mystery but the mystery of love itself, which was large certainly but as real as grass, as natural and unaccountable as bloom and...

…only think a moment that we are here now, and that that was then, and it has come to this, and how odd, odd, odd it is!

His heart pounding with fear and elation, and his head humming with the fierce certainty of a sure thing, he kissed her. She responded as though for her too a certainty had proved out, and...

Time, I think, is like walking backward away from something: say, from a kiss. First there is the kiss; then you step back, and the eyes fill up your vision, then the eyes are framed...

Should he make a note? He felt for the smooth shape of his pen in his pocket. ‘Theme for a novel: The contrary pull … ” No. If this notion were real, he needn’t make...

Snow not falling but flying sidewise, and sudden, not signaled by the slow curdling of clouds all day and a flake or two drifting downward, but rushing forward all at once as though sent for....