How do you feel if you’re in love? she asked. Ah, said Rosita with swooning eyes, you feel as though pepper has been sprinkled on your hear, as though tiny fish are swimming in your veins.
He had no thought of how it was before he came to the farm. His memory of those times was like a house where no one lives and the furniture has rotten away.
Thackeray’s a good writer and Flaubert is a great artist. Trollope is a good writer and Dickens is a great artist. Colette is a very good writer and Proust is a great artist. Katherine Anne Porter was an extremely good writer and Willa Cather was a great artist.
Aside from all else, there is some truth in that; clocks indeed must have their sacrifice: what is death but an offering to time and eternity?
One lost an IQ point for every year spent on the West Coast.
How silly, my dear; don’t you know that if I came here as a child, then most of me never left?
I knew Faulkner very well. He was a great friend of mine. Well, as much as you could be a friend of his, unless you were a fourteen-year-old nymphet. Then you could be a great friend!
Es ist sehr leicht den Regen zu ignorieren, wenn man einen Regenmantel hat.
It is easy to ignore the rain if you have a raincoat.
The compulsively superstitious person is also very often a serious believer in fate; that was the case with Perry.
Very few authors, especially the unpublished, can resist an invitation to read aloud.
Nobody likes naughtiness.
Happiness leaves such slender records; it is the dark days that are so voluminously documented.
They’ve had the old clap-yo’-hands so many times it amounts to applause.
Miss Langman was often, in interviews, described as a witty conversationalist; how can a woman be witty when she hasn’t a sense of humor? – and she has none, which was her central flaw as a person and as an artist.
The instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame.
And unless one can observe the guilt and regret of the mourners, surely there is nothing satisfactory about being dead?
My acquaintances are many, my friends are few; those who really know me fewer still.
Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.
The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the victims might as well have been killed by lightning.