[My father] had a name for the bottom of the sky–‘the hem of heaven.

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...

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…

He suddenly exploded in a flurry of arms and legs, out of which flew a ball.

There was a short railway official travelling up to the terminus, three fairly short market-gardeners picked up two stations afterwards, one very short widow lady going up from a small Essex town, and a very...

They called him a comical genius and carried his stories carefully home, and they wondered at how the stories spilled out on the way, for they never sounded the same repeated in their own kitchens.

… that distant look characteristic of people who do not wish to be agreeable…

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...

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

Then there was the church and the villagers on the sidewalks, the red geraniums on the graves in the cemetery, Perez fainting (he crumpled over like a rag doll), the blood-red earth spilling over Maman’s...

At the edge of the still, dark pool that was the sea, at the brimming edge of freedom where no boat was to be seen, she spoke the first words of the few they were...

…his eyes were exactly the color of that gleaming golden-brown moss you see on stones under the clear water of running brooks.

My head felt like it was going to crack down the middle, like some demented dwarf was driving glass pins through my brain.

My dears, laugh at me if you like; it is not conventionally beautiful, but there is something in its quaint old face which pleases me. If it could play the piano, I am sure it...

They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking,...

He looked as if he had been beaten to death with a wine bottle, but by doing it with the contents of the bottle.

The young man who stood there was the handsomest mad Rand had ever seen, almost too handsome for masculinity.

He swung around. His body, bathed in the first rays of the sun, was stippledwith color like a stained glass saint.

If I could tell you about RedI would sing to you of fire Sweet like cherriesBurning like cinnamon Smelling like a rose in the sun

To write, for example, a crime that is horrible but which somehow ‘resembles’ the butterfly, which would be light and fine like the butterfly. I could also describe the butterfly, but bearing in mind the...

Tonight the sun has died like an Emperor … great scarlet arcs of silk … saffron … green … crimson … and the blaze of Venus to remind one of the absolute and the infinite...

… the glow of a sunset more lasting, more roseate. more human – filling, perhaps, with romantic wonder the thoughts of some solitary lover, wandering in the street below and brought to a standstill before...

A good story or a book is all about it’s power to hold it’s readers still till the very last word of it’s climax – complexity in language, dialogues, descriptions, everything else is secondary!

The minute grains of sand slipped silently down the curved hourglass, no matter how many times the people of Earth willed them not to. Time, fate and the actions of others were out of their...

The sky was as blue and delicate as a porcelain teacup, and the hills rolled gently in all directions, intersected occasionally with the silver ribbon of a river.

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

His voice reminded me of the slow stretching descent of honey from a highly placed silver spoon.

Her mouth was a gash of red, like the torn-open stomach of a sacrifice, bloody and oracular. Behind it her teeth shone sharp and white as bone.

… like an entirely cloudless sky when one is going mountaineering…

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.

It was raining when Amarelle Parathis went out just after sunset to find a drink, and there was strange magic in the rain. It came down in pale lavenders and coppers and reds, soft lines...

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...

A solitary finger of light fell upon it, illuminating motes of golden dust floating in the air.

Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter it stares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride with her pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom’s sleeve. Up from the gravelly, pick-and-shovel labor...

Inside the building, the sun lights up segments of the rotting wooden floor through the many holes in the roof. As I look for her, I register things: the soggy floorboards. The smell of almonds,...

… 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...

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

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

His voice gave out and he made several wavy motions with his hand, indicative of the shape of a woman who would probably be unable to keep her balance.

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...

The castle grounds were gleaming in the sunlight as though freshly painted; the cloudless sky smiled at itself in the smoothly sparkling lake, the satin-green lawns rippled occasionally in a gentle breeze: June had arrived.

Photographers tend not to photograph what they can’t see, which is the very reason one should try to attempt it. Otherwise we’re going to go on forever just photographing more faces and more rooms and...

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...

… a constant repetition and a boundless incongruity of useless but indestructible objects.

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 fruition of the year had come and the night should have been fine with a moon in the sky and the crisp sharp promise of frost in the air, but it wasn’t that way....

If, however, the poetic end might have been as well or better attained without sacrifice of technical correctness in such matters, the impossibility is not to be justified, since the description should be, if it...

I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.

He was almost twenty and Ree knew most girls would call him handsome or dreamy or some such. Sandy hair, blue eyes, put together strong, with bright teeth and one of those smiles.

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...