A raintree bent towards a window in one side of the bungalow, eavesdropping on the conversations that had taken place inside over years.

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they’re not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it’s not that. It’s just, you know, seeing them pass, that’s how they’ll be all their life; they’ll get hit, hurt, cut,...

Tricky was a plain-faced man with a very handsome voice – a voice like the sound of a clarinet, at once liquid and penetrating, and lovely to listen to.

She wasn’t dressed like a student. She wore an elaborate burgundy dress with long skirts, a tight waist, and matching burgundy gloves that rose all the way to her elbows.Moving deliberately, she managed to get down off the stool without tangling her feet and made her way over to stand nest to my table. Her...

The atmosphere felt unexpectedly intense and the music was frantic. The beat made it both difficult to think straight and pleasant to move – like swimming almost.

She was strong and stubborn but loving. She was an untouchable angel with a devil’s mark. She was beautiful.

The sun shined and winked through wind-rustled leaves to paint the roadway with an ever-shifting mosaic of light and shadows.

Description is what makes the reader a sensory participant in the story. Good description is a learned skill,one of the prime reasons you cannot succeed unless you read a lot and write a lot. It’s not just a question of how-to, you see; it’s a question of how much to. Reading will help you answer...

Art is the reflection of pure emotion and mind, the nature of sensation. An artist illustrates that.

The lawn was white with doctors

Una rosa se despertó en su sangre y ensombreció sus mejillas. Un agitado aliento separó los pétalos de sus labios, que temblaron. Sobre ella sopló algún viento sur de pasión y movió los delicados pliegos de su vestido

Those eyes had seen people weep, and had cared, and had hurt them again anyway. It’s a look that no human eyes should ever have.

The cyclone had set the house down gently, very gently – for a cyclone—in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang...

What it must feel like to lie back with cut wrists in a warm bath, a voluptuous dwindling feeling.

She had something that is gone from the world, from the female world. A sweetness without sentimentality, a limpidity without naivety. She was so easy to hurt, to tease. And when she teased, it was like a caress.

He had a W.C. Fields twang and a nose like a prize strawberry.

Inside plum trees stood in a row, flowers lifted their pale throats to the moon and stars, a magnolia held its tight-closed buds like white candles in its green hands.

But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so, when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defence, unconfident of success, she was...

… Odette seemed a fascinating and desirable woman, the attraction which her body held for him had aroused a painful longing to secure the absolute mastery of even the tiniest particles of her heart.

Canary light of oil lamps

Alfred is taken past this broom, and enters this room; which can only be described as ‘piecemeal’. It is full of pieces of fish-market paraphernalia, pieces of military-regalia; and pieces of rusted-steel.It is full of these spiky-hooks, fishmongery-books; and saline-scalers. These bayonet-blades, grenades; and dusty loud-halers.

Anatomy is to physiology as geography is to history; it describes the theatre of events.

As always, there was an all-American war hero look to him, coded in his tousled brown hair, his summer-narrowed hazel eyes, the straight nose that ancient Anglo-Saxons had graciously passed on to him. Everything about him suggested valor and power and a firm handshake.

A ‘sadist’ of her kind is an artist in evil, which a wholly wicked person could not be…

She had a dour Presbyterian mind and a code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do.

At last he said, “Did you come out of the big mountains?”Gitano shook his head slowly. “No, I walked down the Salinas Valley.”The afternoon thought would not let Joey go. “Did you ever go into the big mountains back there?”The old dark eyes grew fixed, and their light turned inward on the years that were...

… they imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either a fantastic indifference or a sustained and lofty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.

… there was no need for him to hasten towards the attainment of a happiness already captured and held in a safe place, which would not escape his grasp again.

Bicycles, bullock carts, and buses that belched thick, black smoke moved in anarchic streams with the auto rickshaws and cars along the streets. Many of the shops—normally selling everything from groceries to stainless steel cookware to shoes—stood silent behind shutters and honeycomb grilles.

This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

When describing myself, I don’t use superlatives. Just normal latives. And if I use the same word more than once to describe myself, it’s a relative. This is how I became my own father. And mother.

The duchess turned on Eugène with one of those insolent stares that envelop a man from head to foot, flatten him out, and leave him at zero.

He spoke so effortlessly, as if his mouth were a musical instrument that just let sound out when touched, when opened.

When Headmaster Conrady pointed out the white clapboard chapel, I wondered whether there might be at least one structure with a softer name, like Church of the Good Shepherd or Chapel of the Non-Weapon-Bearing Angels. No such luck. Armistice Chapel was a place of peace, but only if you signed the treaty and sat at...

The viscountess had raised the forefinger of her right hand and made a pretty gesture toward a stool at her feet. There was such intense tyrannical passion in the gesture that the marquis relinquished the doorknob and came back.

…the nest is agiggle with excitement.

Night was fading over the fields as if the rain had washed the darkness out of the hem of its garment.

I’m looking for a man— -There are several suspects in Topeka, Ks. that match that description. Why don’t you try there first?

A few blossoms float into the room. They drop like frayed yellow ribbons on the gray carpet.

All kinds of weird stuff going down, whisperings in corners, significant matches struck and blown out. The whores, unoccupied, were drinking heavily. The police, occupied were drinking even more heavily. The grass in the corner wanted to drink most heavily, but lacked the poke.

I was shown into a room. A red room. Red wallpaper, red curtains, red carpet. They said it was a sitting-room, but I don’t know why they’d decided to confine its purpose just to sitting. Obviously, sitting was one of the things you could do in a room this size; but you could also stage...

As that ripe summer turned to autumn, the sunlight cooled to a slantwise gleam, bronzing the beach grass and setting the beetle-bung trees afire.

I became simply a pair of eyes, staring through my mask at Char. I needed no ears because I was too far off to hear his voice, no words because I was too distant for speech, and no thoughts – those I saved for later. He bent his head. I loved the hairs on the...

I have seen many a face that was more good-looking — never one that looked half so good.

The child-like, gum-chewing naïveté , the glamour rooted in despair, the self admiring carelessness, the perfected otherness, the wispiness, the shadowy, voyeuristic, vaguely sinister aura, the pale, soft-spoken magical presence, the skin and bones…

She was a thin, sickly, bony child, like an eft, with fine hair like sunlit smoke.

Era d’altronde uno di quegli uomini che amano assistere alla propria vita, ritenendo impropria qualsiasi ambizione a viverla.Si sarà notato che essi osservano il loro destino nel modo in cui, i più, sono soliti osservare una giornata di pioggia.

The nature of atheism merits clarification on two further points which involve less common ideas about theism. The first involves the idea of ‘God’ which is metaphorical — for example, a theist who believes in ‘God’ as a principle of conscience or morality. This ‘God’ exists in a person’s mind and it is not something...

He had a prince’s looks but a pirate’s eyes.

Fitz pulled her forward, and the warm tingling in her hand shot through her body–like a million feathers swelling underneath her skin, tickling her from the inside out.