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...

Power is meant to be shared with the goal of empowering others. Hoarded power weakens others and exalts oneself. Power, when grounded in biblical values, serves others by liberating them. It acknowledges that people bear...

Because, of course, it wouldn’t do to just talk to her. She had spoken to him in flashes of daylight, and he felt he ought to reply in kind.

When he did appear his eyes were as brown as I remembered, pupils flecked with gold like beach pebbles.

I should have realized, when Cathal kissed me in the hallway, that my response was the first raindrop heralding a storm.

I paid the taxi driver, got out with my suitcase, surveyed my surroundings, and just as I was turning to ask the driver something or get back into the taxi and return forthwith to Chillán...

The city was asleep, and the bookshop felt like a boat adrift in a sea of silence and shadows.

[About describing atomic models in the language of classical physics:]We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned...

Let the systematic theologian spell it out. Let the artists throw out thoughts and slants, maybe even slants no one else has thought of. They should give another view of something familiar to help us...

No human metal had gone into the forging of that blade. It was alive with moonlight, translucent, a shard of crystal so thin that it seemed to almost vanish when seen edge on. There was...

They had painted a lady leaning her arms on the sill of the window. This lady was waiting for a husband. Her flesh was slack and she was some forty-five years old. Perhaps she had...