If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s men who bite.
He looked as lonely and innapropriate as a seagull in a wheat field.
She ought to be protected against herself.
I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all... They want a certain kind of identity; they’re jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety.
People did usually look at her, because she suggested the engaging young person at a party to whom you would like to be introduced, and others because they knew she was Grady McNeil, the daughter of an important man. There were a few whose eyes she held for a different reason: and it was because, in her aura of willful and privileged enchantment, they sensed she was a girl to whom something was going to happen.
A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Chrysanthemums,” my friend commented as we moved through our garden stalking flower-show blossoms with decapitating shears, “are like lions. Kingly characters. I always expect them to spring. To turn on me with a growl and a roar.
All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. Varmints looking for a chance to slam the door in your face. It’s the same the whole world over.
I’d been to a movie, come home and gone to bed with a bourbon nightcap and the newest Simenon: so much my idea of comfort that I couldn’t understand a sense of unease that multiplied until I could hear my heart beating.
What I am trying to achieve is a voice sitting by a fireplace telling you a story on a winter’s evening.
There’s never two of anything.
It was ideal apple-eating weather; the whitest sunlight descended from the purest sky, and an easterly wind rustled, without ripping loose, the last of the leaves on the Chinese elms. Autumns reward western Kansas for the evils that the remaining seasons impose: winter’s rough Colorado winds and hip-high, sheep-slaughtering snows; the slushes and the strange land fogs of spring; and summer, when even crows seek the puny shade, and the tawny infinitude of wheatstalks bristle, blaze.
Even so, my spirits heightened whenever I felt in my pocket the key to this apartment; with all its gloom, it still was a place of my own, the first, and my books were there, and jars of pencils to sharpen, everything I needed, so I felt, to become the writer I wanted to be.
Preacher was a small man, a mite, and his face was a million wrinkles. Tufts of gray wool sprouted from his bluish skull and his eyes were sorrowful. He was so bent that he resembled a rusty sickle and his skin was the yellow of superior leather. As he studied what remained of his farm, his hand pestered his chin wisely but, to tell the truth, he was thinking nothing.
Passing through the orchard, Mr. Clutter proceeded along beside the river, which was shallow here and strewn with islands – midstream beaches of soft sand, to which, on Sundays gone by, hot-weather Sabbaths when Bonnie had still “felt up to things,” picnic baskets had been carted, family afternoons whiled away waiting for a twitch at the end of a fishline.
A flower was blooming inside him, and soon, when all tight leaves unfurled, when the noon of youth burned whitest, he would turn and look, as others had, for the opening of another door.
And suppose you don’t like it? Excellent question; and, strangely, one I’d never asked myself, principally because I had chosen the ingredients, and I always have faith in my own judgment.
As he returned to his duties with a satisfied waddle, I couldn’t resist reminding her that she hadn’t answered his question. “Do you love him?” “I told you: you can make yourself love anybody.
As we grow older all is too explainable, the capacity to invent pleasurable alarm recedes: too bad, a pity – throughout our lives we ought to believe in ghost hotels.
She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence.