Outside, I could smell the Zebra. Even if for some reason I stopped feeling cold or hot or rain or sun, I bet I could close my eyes and still tell which season I was...

These hands are steady enough, but they are large. Had he been a proper pianist – he’s dabbled inexpertly – his ten-note span might be of use.

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...

It was June, and the world smelled of roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.

My body, still too heavy with sleep to move…

It slowly began to dawn on me that I had been staring at her for an impossible amount of time. Lost in my thoughts, lost in the sight of her. But her face didn’t look...

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

In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that...

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...

The waterwheel was twice a man’s height, wider than a man’s two stretched arms. The timbers, braced and bolted with rusty iron were heavy, hand-hewn, swollen with a century of wet. Moss bearded the paddles,...

He stood gazing at her; traces of the old fresco were apparent in her face and limbs, and these he tried incessantly, afterwards, to recapture, both when he was with Odette, and when he was...

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...

A vast field opened like a blossoming tulip, flowers blooming in the rippling airs of spring. High and frothy trees hugged air and sun as they gallantly cast a shade over the earth. On the...

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.

…she felt as if her entire body were glowing with the taste of sunlight, of wind blowing in wide spaces and trees reaching their burdened arms to boundless skies.

The house was silent, but somewhere in the garden was a swimming pool filled with unsettled water.

Newly Found Sugary Spill: Tastes Like Dried Spit or Old Soda

Trinity Park lies directly across from the library, Trinity Church rising like a midieval thought amidst the glass and steel towers.

… the kiss, the bodily surrender which would seem natural and but moderately attractive…

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...

Vzduch venku byl kapalného skupenství. Černá, antracitová voda, vybízející k tomu, aby jí člověk položil ruku na hřbet a pohladil ji.

Alex Barrow’s broad face, with the roughened skin that gave him an air of experience. His powerful, packed, wrestler’s body. The thick black fur at the base of his throat. It was wrong to call...

Tornadoes were, in out part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense.

The crow flew closer, as if to hear its praises.

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...

Now my uncle knew many of them personally, and also ladies of another class, not clearly distinguished from actresses in my mind. He used to entertain them at his house.

Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts.

The atmosphere beneath is languorous, and is so tinged with azure that what artists call the middle distance partakes also of that hue, while the horizon beyond is of the deepest ultramarine.