Ana > Recent Status Updates

'Thought travels. I remain...where I was.'

'She was strong, but even the strongest needed someone to lean on.'

'It will come as a shock to the readers of the best scientific romance to learn that it was the policeman who was talking and the amateur who was listening, even with a certain respect.'

'Hull said that America had no law against aid to Spain – only a policy of "moral aloofness".'

'For the whole air was dense with the morbidity of blackmail, which is the most morbid of human things, because it is a crime concealing a crime; a black plaster on a blacker wound.'

'"Then too there's the opposite: being invisible, when you're in a particular state of mind, opaque, somewhere else."'

'I'm thinking that silence obliges long journeys in order to see.'

'I awaken in a warm light filtering through the transparent curtains, with the sensation of having had dreams that don't connect to me but to the room, left here by hundreds of previous dreamers.'

'First of all, the child moving his little plastic train up and down against the window glass, maybe thereby experiencing the childish completeness of being inside something while still being in possession of it from the outside. He's quite focused as he plays, but the toy train may compensate for the loss of an external form that is no longer visible.'

'It's as if we are far more removed now. I think things are different now; more stable and moderate, with less demanding engagement. Everything is slightly more marginal.'

'Some words cause one to behave in a certain way.'

'"Says the sea to the sailor: strive with me and live; neglect me and drown."'

'Then there's the lengthy time stored in the box, the instrument's negative outline forming a hollow on the bottom; all the truly dead time between an object's usefulness and its becoming a collector's item.'

'They speak an unadulterated dialect as a form of resistance.'

'I simply hope for an age favorable to me.'

'And now we must walk a mile and a half along the road to the next inn, and I will try to tell you all about it. For Heaven knows a man should have fire and ale when he dares tell such a story.'

'The morning is crystal clear, almost springlike; or maybe it's the fact that I'm here, inexplicably and lighthearted.'

'Like a true philosopher, Flambeau had no aim in his holiday; but, like a true philosopher, he had an excuse. He had a sort of half purpose, which he took just so seriously that its success would crown the holiday, but just so lightly that its failure would not spoil it.'

'The more historically improbable the facts you put together, the more mystery-starved readers you'll find to buy it.'

'Many writers, even when accustomed to writing with a computer, know that sometimes they'd prefer to carve like the Sumerians on a tablet of clay so as to think in peace.'

'"We can then pronounce," he'd said, "that if our gauges cease to resolve the Milky Way into stars, it is not because its nature is doubtful, but because it is fathomless."'

'Both [Germany and Italy], especially the former, gained the impression that the "Young General" was both able and likely to be influenced by them. They decided this without perhaps taking adequate account of the power wielded over Franco by his wife, a fervent Catholic who increasingly saw her husband as the leader chosen by God to save Spain from the enemies of the Church.'

'William imitates both the male and female sounds with great success, cupping his hands and blowing through the aperture between them. The owls always answer him. "You make them fall in love with you," Lina says. "I make them fall in love with each other," William says.'

'She is grateful for this joy, the joy of being amazed, this transformation of her gaze from admiration—for anyone can see the stars are beautiful—to astonishment. This is William's greatest gift to her, she thinks, the gift of awe...Somehow, her awe makes what is quotidian or tedious—the tiring business of making meals or beds, or washing clothes—almost holy.'

'Wind and rain blow in visible gusts like giant hourglasses bending across the meadows by the river.' Not sure what this is even meant to evoke...

'Such breaches of [France's] non-intervention were officially excused as caused by "errors of navigation".'

'trying to stay away from her was like asking the ocean to stop kissing the shore.'

'The night smelled of rakı and cigarette smoke, and I felt its grip deep inside my mind.'

'But like a seasoned assassin, I remained impassive.'

'I mused that Iranians were not like us Turks who had become so Westernized that we'd forgotten our old poets and myths.'