She was garlanded with girls.

When she sang, everyone said, it was like evening on a riverbank, sinking down into the moss with the sky pouring over you.

had no desire to be pursued by the hot breath of young men

Each line of Ovid demanded an unspooling of which object bore the action, and by whose brave hand.

She stayed up late, rapturously late.

( Read more... )

Stories are part of them and their world in a fundamental way that mortals have difficulty grasping; a story may be a singular event from the past, but - crucially, it is also a pattern that shapes their behavior and predicts future events.

it is always restful to be around someone who does not expect anything from you beyond what is in your nature

It's never like you never left."

I miss the edges of things.

It was impossible not to be a little in love with everyone at seventeen.

"Sometimes you just need to know where you are," she said. "You know? Where the outside world ends and you begin."

It felt like discovering inconsistencies in her favorite television series, finding evidence of his ( Read more... )

Ocher handprints, thousands of years old, found stenciled in the Chauvet-Pont d'Arc Cave in southeastern France, were formed by spitting red pigment over a hand pressed against the stone wall to merge with an element of strength or perhaps to signal a prehistory declaration of self.

A Paris café is all cafés, just as a gravesite may echo others ( Read more... )

For reasons sufficient to the writer, many places, people, observations and impressions have been left out of this book. Some were secrets and some were known by everyone and everyone has written about them and will doubtless write more.

All of the sadness of the city came suddenly with the first cold rains of winter

Now that the bad weather had ( Read more... )

Quotes

Working for change... is particularly hard for women, "who are taught not to rebel from infancy, from the time they are first wrapped in pink blankets, the color of their caste....Women have been persuaded of their own inferiority; too many of them believe the male fiction that they are emotional, illogical, unstable, inept with mechanical ( Read more... )

Empty's just another word for clean.

I was there for everything, but those meetings were like dying.

Anything that hurt them only ever hurt them for a little while.

The black water sank right down to the roots of her hair, right through the braids, and made her ears go pop as water blocked up the canals.

Salt water had always relieved her: salt ( Read more... )

"Oh, to be sure," cried Emma, "it is always incomprehensible to a man that a woman should ever refuse an offer of marriage."

A poet in love must be encouraged in both capacities, or neither.

I have been long perfectly convinced, though perhaps I never told you so before, that the sea is very rarely of use to any body. I am sure it almost killed me ( Read more... )

cruel Works / Of many Wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other -from William Blake's Jerusalem

Robin had never been taught the fundamentals of grammar - he knew what worked in English because it sounded right - and so in learning Latin, he learned the basic parts of language itself.

Figuring out the ( Read more... )

The truth is I'm not a witch, exactly: I'm a person with prayers, a person who believes in spirits and plays with fire.

I have no choice but to live among men.

I'm your typical Stevie Nicks witch.

I learned from D.A.R.E. to drink like I was dying.

Alcohol, a friend told me, is called spirits for a reason. It will possess you if you let it.

I'm a ( Read more... )