The flowers which played then among the grass, the water which rippled past in the sunshine, the whole landscape which served as environment to their apparition lingers around the memory of them still with its...

I steal,” Winkle said, with a smile that said I’m joking and a glint in his eye that said I’m not.

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly, as some one has said, a scraping of horses’ tails on cats’ bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way...

Dark-bright fire lit eyes

…the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

She had always wanted to do every thing, and had made more progress in both drawing and music than many might have done with so little labour as she ever would submit to… She was...

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...

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

Oh, he did look like a deity – the perfect balance of danger and charm, he was at the same time fascinating and inaccessible, distant because of his demonstrated flawlessness, and possessing such strength of...

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.

Sidney: The woman took a seat to reorganize, and Lucy cataloged an almost perfectly symmetrical face with cheekbones that could part hair. The woman’s pale face hid underneath the lip-gloss and mascara that ran interference,...

This morning, light lapped the water as if God had spilt a goblet of molten gold upon a ground of darkest velvet.

Son front, quoique peu ridé, semble porter le sceau d’une myriade d’années. Ses cheveux gris sont des archives du passé et ses yeux, plus gris encore, sont des sibylles de l’avenir.

Somewhere int he flesh of the earth the dreadful earthquake shuddered, the tide walked to and fro on the leash of the moon, rainbows formed, winds swept the sky like giant brooms piling up clouds...

Among all the methods by which love is brought into being, among all the agents which disseminate that blessed bane, there are few so efficacious as the great gust of agitation which, now and then,...

She was a large, boneless woman who draped herself like an old blanket over the chairs of the apartment, staring for hours with her gray eyes at ghosts, figments, recollections, and dust caught in oblique...

The color scheme of the whole sanatorium seemed to be based on liver. Dark, glowering woodwork, burnt-brown leather chairs, walls that might once have been white but had succumbed under a spreading malady of mod...

She grew up in the ordinary paradise of the English countryside. When she was five she walked to school, two miles, across meadows covered with cowslips, buttercups, daisies, vetch, rimmed by hedges full of blossom...

You can be so much in a room that the world outside turns to water. You’ve got the heater blowing out burnt air, but you still don’t get warm. Your ankles are singed, but your...

Her features were dainty, her small slender wrists climbed up to become the delicate shoulders that beckoned him. Her skin was like peach-tinted cream and he need not have touched her to experience the melting...

Canary light of oil lamps

… the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of...

The desert at night was black and a strange madder-tinted silver; the sky was black, and the great contorted cliffs, and the vast expanses of sand that stretched out in all directions. But the red...

I stumble across the sea of tarmac, finding pavement, concealment and a brick wall. Palms brace against the scrubby surface. My stomach churns and then bubbles over, burning my throat as acrid yellow acid spills...

I wanted this day, the perfect buttery sun like peach ice cream, the speed, the satin leather of the car seat, the fair. Forbidden fruit, a day like no other.

…an old guy with a Hemingway beard and the build of a girl.

There is little more I can add short of dissecting the man, or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight southeasterly curvature of his manhood.

To demonstrate is to show clearly & deliberately, and to describe is to give a detailed account in words.That thing called ‘Love’ is defined when demonstrated, not when described.

… washed clean like a porcelain, with housewifely care…

Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child’s take on morals and ethics.

Un colț desprins al perdelei lăsa să se vadă o lună galbenă, în zdrențe, închipuită de un pictor nebun.

Tirza, his youngest daughter, the one who turned out best. Turned out wonderfully, both inside and out.

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.

Her flesh was powdery and voluptuously weary, as if tenderized by all the different beds and arms in which she had lain. Her face was as soft as the pulpy flash of an overripe banana,...

Remember…we don’t see objects, we see light. […] Light can do anything water can do–flow, wash, trickle. It can do anything an artist can do–paint, burnish, carve. Candlelight falls, licks a face. There is always...

… 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.

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

His body was tubby but his arms apparently couldn’t understand that, for they were long and scrawny. From his brow to an inch below his eyes, his nose turned up; from there on, down. His...

He was a compact, clearcut man, with precise features, a lot of very soft black hair, and thoughtful dark brown eyes. He had a look of wariness, which could change when he felt relaxed or...

The sky was like ebony and the only illumination was the harsh white light of the central streetlamp, which cast shadows so hard it seemed you might cut yourself on them.

One word I’d use to describe space is lonely. The only way I’ll board a space shuttle is if I had a babysitter with me. You know, to watch the baby I’ll make with her.

Tomorrow was over the horizon and it would take an entire day to reach

… it was with an unusual intensity of pleasure, a pleasure destined to have a lasting effect upon his character and conduct…

She had an evil face, smoothed by hypocrisy; but her manners were excellent.

He was too many things at once – a boy, a man, and everything in between – and the differing parts of himself seldom came into balance. She found him attractive in that way. Yet...

Lady Moon rose an’ gazed o’er my busted’n’beautsome Valleys with silv’ry’n’sorryin’ eyes, an’ the dingos mourned for the died uns.

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

The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla.

Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to...

… with a quiet suggestion of infinity…