Asides
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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.
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Beautiful sentences
At first, it seemed like the saddest thing to me, that no one would ever see these paintings. But then I got to thinking: What if you tried to take this wall and put it in a gallery somewhere? It would simply be five faded paintings in a gallery. And that’s when I realized: perhaps…
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Beautiful sentences
At a nightclub in Istanbul once, Gillian had been shocked, without quite knowing why, to find one of those vacant, sweetly pink and blue church Virgins, life-sie, standing as part of the decorations, part hat-stand, part dumb-waitress, as you might find a many-handed Hindu deity or plaster Venus in an equivalent occidental club. Now suddenly,…
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Beautiful sentences
Your parents don’t get to tell your story. Your sisters don’t. When he’s old enough, even Pat doesn’t get to tell your story. I’m your husband and I don’t even get to tll it. So I don’t care how lovesick this director is, he doesn’t tell it. Even fucking Richard Burton doesn’t get to tell your story!…
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Beautiful sentences
She was Hamlet and his father and Shakespeare: she saw Milton’s snake and the miraculous flying horse of the Thief of Baghdad, but Saint Paul’s angels rested under suspicion of being made-up because she had been told they were special because true. A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
Some memories remain close; you can shut your eyes and find yourself back in them. These are first-person memories—I Memories. But there are second-person memories, too, distant you memories, and these are trickier: you watch yourself in disbelief—like the Much Ado wrap party at the old Playhouse in 1961, when you seduced Ron. Even recalling it is like…
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Beautiful sentences
A woman’s life runs from wedding to childbirth to nothing in a twinkling of an eye. A. S. Byatt,The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye.
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Beautiful sentences
Alvis stared into the drawing for a long time. He even thought about buying it, but he realized that if he hung it this way, upside down, people would just turn it over. This, he decided, was also the problem with the book he hoped to write. He could never write a standard war book;…
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Beautiful sentences
Once upon a time, when men and women hurtled through the air on metal wings, when they wore webbed feet and walked on the bottom of the sea, learning the speech of whales and the songs of the dolphins, when pearly-fleshed and jewelled apparitions of Texan herdsmen and houris shimmered in the dusk on Nicaraguan…