For mile after mile the same melodic phrase rose up in my memory. I simply couldn’t get free of it. Each time it had a new fascination for me. Initially imprecise in outline, it seemed...

Now I was falling faster than a comet plummeting to the earth, just waiting to create a giant explosion. Just like a comet, I had no idea exactly how much damage I would leave in...

Lisa was thinking, as she climbed the apparently unending staircase, the she had taken pretty long odds. She had not hesitated to buck the Tiger, Life. Simon Iff had warned her that she was acting...

August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.

And now as if the cleaning and the scrubbing and the scything and the mowing had drowned it there rose that half-heard melody, that intermittent music which the ear half catches but lets fall; a...

On many occasions the curious atmospheric effects enchanted me vastly; these including a strikingly vivid mirage – the first I had ever seen – in which distant bergs became the battlements of unimaginable cosmic castles.

The autumn twilight turned into deep and early night as they walked. Tristran could smell the distant winter on the air–a mixture of night-mist and crisp darkness and the tang of fallen leaves.

The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter...

From time to time, too, and for the space of two or three paces, an image or an echo would rise up from the recesses of time: in the little streets of the beaters of...

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the...

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

We didn’t talk much, and the silence hung like a silk curtain, light and lovely.

their heart grew coldthey let their wings down

Imagine a vast and glittering ocean seen from a great height. It stretches to the clear curved limit of every angle of horizon, the sun burning on a billion tiny wavelets. Now imagine a smooth...

…all kinds of images swim like tropical fish in the bathysphere inside my skull …

With the music of our singing in the background, I looked at the church candles and thought about the surreal connection between images and memory. The peaceful and joyous candles flickering there during the Christmas...

They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman’s beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a...

…a hazy yellow moon was climbing along the curve of the old basilica on the hill. As it rose, it seemed to be gathering the silence up around it like a net.

The sun was late, stuck in heavy mist. When it finally broke free there was no one to see, no one to applaud its sterling effort, because everyone in Freemantle was heading west. The burnt...

From daybreak to sunset she turned her thoughts, like boulders, over. She set them in long lines. She rearranged their order…

]Sardisoften turning her thoughts here]you like a goddessand in your song most of all she rejoiced.But now she is conspicuous among Lydian womenas sometimes at sunsetthe rosyfingered moonsurpasses all the stars. And her lightstretches over...

So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.

It is not often that you see life and fiction take each other by the hand and dance.

Shimamoto was in charge of the records. She’d take one from its jacket, place it carefully on the turntable without touching the grooves with her fingers, and, after making sure to brush the cartridge free...

I’ve recovered my tenderness by long looking;I’m a Socrates of small fury.The waves bends with the fish. I’m taughtAs water teaches stone. Believe me, extremest oriole,I can hear light on a dry day.The world is...

Dad and I leave town in the early dark. It’s the second Sunday of the holidays, and we pack up the old blue car with enough clothes for summer and hit the road. It’s so...

All about us the earth steamed; mists rose up toward heaven like clouds of incense; a shattered rainbow still hovered in the air.

]sing to usthe one with violets in her lap]mostly]goes astray

Thousands of mosquitoes had already bitten all of us on chest and arms and ankles. Then a bright idea came to me: I jumped up on the steel roof of the car and stretched out...

Maddock stabbed his fried egg with his fork, and bright yellow yolk bled all over his plate like a sunshine hemorrhage.

In the afternoon, over gold screens,I will brush the blue dust of my dreams.

One evening he was in his room, his brow pressing hard against the pane, looking, without seeing them, at the chestnut trees in the park, which had lost much of their russet-coloured foliage. A heavy...

The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.

Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun;Thyself from thine affectionTakest warmth enough, and from thine eyeAll lesser birds will take their jollity.Up, up, fair bride, and callThy stars from out their several boxes, takeThy...

I often wish I’d got on better with your father,’ he said.But he never liked anyone who–our friends,’ said Clarissa; and could have bitten her tongue for thus reminding Peter that he had wanted to...

In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape being blown away. My face was stung...

The brain had its own food on which it battened, and the imagination,made grotesque by terror, twisted and distorted as a living thing by pain,danced like some foul puppet on a stand and grinned through...

We have a bad habit of seeing books as sort of cheaply made movies where the words do nothing but create visual narratives in our heads.So too often what passes for literary criticism is “I...

Rain woke him, a slow drizzle, his feet tangled in coils of discarded fiberoptics. The arcade’s sea of sound washed over him, receded, returned. Rolling over, he sat up and held his head.

The cork was in the bottle. He and the Atropos were trapped.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn’t insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

James was sixteen, Cam seventeen, perhaps. She had looked round for someone who was not there, for Mrs. Ramsay, presumably. But there was only kind Mrs. Beckwith turning over her sketches under the lamp. Then,...

Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands touched, before his face broke from repose to greeting and the lips moved to speech, I got the first astonishing impact of his personality....

As a writer, I see the saga of your life in a single glimpse. It may be inaccurate, but my version doesn’t lack for creativity.

Morning came in through the blinds cutting everything into ribbons.

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,...

For the first time she could see a man’s head naked of its skull. Saw the cunning thoughts race in and out through the caves and promontories of his mind long before they darted through...

The graceful wings of a dove lead to the endless imagination in a dream wings of pain.

But it is just two lovers, holding hands and in a hurry to reach their car, their locked hands a starfish leaping through the dark.

Whose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village, though;He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queerTo stop without...