D. A. Hosek

Just another writer

  • Beautiful Sentences

    Books have to be read (worse luck, for it takes a long time); it is the only way of discovering what they contain. A few savage tribes eat them, but reading is the only method of assimilation revealed to the west. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel.

  • Beautiful sentences

    Let the schools of literary criticism, rapacious fingerlings, resort to the facts of the author’s life before they can interpret the text. Nadine Gordimer, “The Empire of Joseph Roth.”

  • Halfway done

    I did my annual life expectancy calculation today. I’m expected to live to 90. I seem to be doing a little better every year (perhaps by not dying in the preceding year). I seem to remember that the first time I did this—three years ago, I was halfway to death that time as well.

  • Beautiful sentences

    When the shadow of the sash appeared on the curtains it was between seven and eight oclock and then I was in time again, hearing the watch. It was Grandfather’s and when Father gave it to me he said, Quentin, I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciating-ly apt that…

  • Beautiful sentences

    All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically acceptable. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

  • Beautiful sentences

    At peace? Who but the insane would ever be at peace? What person who has enjoyed life could possibly think one is enough? Who could live even a day and not feel the sweet ache of regret? Jess Walter, Beautiful Ruins

  • Beautiful sentences

    My imagination failed. I got all enmeshed in what was realism and what was reality and what was true—my need not be int that place—and my imagination failed. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.

  • Beautiful sentences

    But aren’t all great quests folly? El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth and the search for intelligent life in the cosmos—we know what’s out there. It’s what isn’t that truly compels us. Technology may have shrunk the epic journey to a couple of short car rides and regional jet lags—four states and twelve hundred miles traversed…

  • Beautiful sentences

    Time passes differently in the solitude of hotel rooms. The mind expands, but lazily, and the body contracts in its bright box of space. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.