"When I look back now...

...on what happened I see mainly fragments, flashes, a momentary phantasmagoria in which everyone focused on some different aspect and nobody at all saw the whole."
                               - Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted, p. 203

"In a deck chair, on the terrace of a chalet...

...in the valley, there is a young woman reading. Every day, before starting work, I pause a moment to look at her with the spyglass. In this thin, transparent air I feel able to perceive in her unmoving form the signs of that invisible movement that reading is, the flow of gaze and breath, but, even more, the journey of the words through the person, their course or their arrest, their spurts, delays, pauses, the attention concentrating or straying, the returns, that journey that seems uniform and on the contrary is always shifting and uneven."

                             Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler, p. 169

"From these many books I am reading...

...at random, I absorb a quantity of ideas and impressions which are in constant fermentation. Every moment of dreaming adds color to imaginings. For hours, some days, I sit and ask myself, what do I want to write, what am I fit to write?
     The pure novel does not seem free enough. I have a feverish desire to invent a form for myself, to follow my inclinations, my impulses, to give free play to the queerness within me. For I repress my queerness. There is a fund of respectability in me, a sort of puritan literary conscience which looks suspiciously on the dancing flames."

   The Early Diary of Anais Nin, Volume Three (1923-1927), hardcover, p.143

"At a certain time of night...

there's no longer any noise around the house. With the low tide so far away from the room all you can hear is the regular beat of the surf, without any echo. While this respite lasts there's no barking of dogs or rattle of trucks. It's after the last walkers go by, just before daylight, that the hours become void of substance, mere empty spaces, sands of pure transience..."
                           
                                     Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair, p. 103-4

"She reached the square...

...and wandered through the chaos, her movements synchronizing themselves to the rhythms of mystical Gnawa music as she dodged motorbikes and acrobats. Billows of grilled-meat smoke gusted thick as houses on fire, teenage boys whispered 'hashish,' and costumed water-sellers clamored 'Photo! Photo!' At a distance, she spotted the hunchback shape of Izil among the henna artists and street dentists."

                           Laini Taylor, Daughter of Smoke & Bone 
                           from Chapter 13, The Graverobber

"It was quite late in the year and...

...the cold was just beginning to bite when Brida received a phone call from Wicca.
     'We're going to meet in the wood in two days' time, on the night of the new moon, just before dark,' was all she said.
     Brida spent those two days thinking about that meeting. She performed the usual rituals and danced to the sound of the world. 'I wish I could dance to some music,' she thought, but she was becoming used to moving her body according to that strange vibration, which she could hear better at night or in certain silent places. Wicca had told her that when she danced to the sound of the world, her soul would feel more comfortable in her body and there would be a lessening of tension. Brida began to notice how people walking down the street didn't seem to know what to do with their hands or how to move their hips or shoulders. She felt like telling them that the world was playing a tune and if they danced a little to that music, and simply allowed their body to move illogically for a few minutes a day, they would feel much better."
                                
                                                        Paulo Coelho, Brida, p.100-101

Caliban: "I prithee, let me bring thee where crabs grow;

...And I with my long nails will dig thee pignuts,
Show thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how
To snare the nimble marmoset. I'll bring thee
To clustering filberts, and sometimes I'll get thee
Young scamels from the rock. Wilt thou go with me?

Stephano: I prithee now, lead the way without any more talking. - Trinculo, the King and all our company else being drowned, we will inherit here. - Here, bear my bottle. - Fellow Trinculo, we'll fill him by and by again."

                               William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act II Scene 2

"Knowing that Gypsies...

...had been persecuted for at least a thousand years, there was no way Sapphire was going to hang out a shingle announcing that she was a Gypsy. Not now that 'romania,' the carefully guarded Gypsy way of life, language, spiritualism, separatism, and law, was preserved and intact. In the U.S., blending in - becoming invisible - was the best means of keeping 'romania' alive."

                        Suzann Kale, A Gypsy on Tenth Avenue, p. 161-162 

"She showed him where she worked...

...It was a doorless cell lined with books, a cell in a hive that was itself a cell in the huge hive that clung by walls and pillars and towers of stone to the immense, steep cliff rising straight out of the sea. The palace of the rulers of Raine had grown from a seedling through the centuries. Long ago, it had been little more than a fortress on the edge of the world... Through the centuries, the palace had become a small country itself, existing between sea and air, burrowed deep into the cliffs, piled above the earth ... 
     The library was a city carved into the cliffs beneath the palace. Parts of it were so old that scrolls and manuscripts got lost for entire reigns and were discovered again in the next...
     He examined her tiny space, a shallow cave so full of shelves that her table barely fit among the books, and she had to sit with her stool in the hallway. He looked at work she had done, the fat jars of ink colored variously and stamped with her initial, her carefully sharpened nubs. Finally, reassured, he unrolled his manuscript again. ..."
  
                                 Patricia A. McKillip, Alphabet of Thorn, p. 6-7  

"I am thinking back to the time...

...when for the four of us the known world hardly existed; days became simply the spaces between dreams, spaces between the shifting floors of time, of acting, of living out the topical. ... A tide of meaningless affairs nosing along the dead level of things, entering no climate, leading us nowhere, demanding of us nothing save the impossible - that we should be. Justine would say that we had been trapped in the projection of a will too powerful and too deliberate to be human - the gravitational field which Alexandria threw down about those it had chosen as its exemplars. ..."

                     Lawrence Durrell, Justine, p. 18-19 (from The Alexandria Quartet)

The power failing,...

...the tennis balls long since dead, the candles blowing out at the table in the main dining room where Douglas Dillon and his wife and George Ball and his wife and Robert McNamara and Arthur Schlesinger are sitting (not eating, no dinner has arrived, no dinner will arrive), the pale linen curtains in the main dining room blowing out, the rain on the parquet floor, the isolation, the excitement, the tropical storm. 
         Imperfect memories. 
         Time yet for a hundred indecisions. 
         A hundred visions and revisions."

                                         Joan Didion, The Last Thing He Wanted, p.226

"Some people are little Chernobyls,...

...shimmering with silent, spreading poison: get anywhere near them and every breath you take will wreck you from the inside out."

                                         Tana French, The Likeness, p.9

"By the end of my stint in Murder I could feel it coming: felt the high sing of madness in the air, the city hunching and twitching like a rabid dog building towards the rampage."

                                          Ibid, p.12

"...over excited toddlers tumbling along like big sweet bumblebees..."

                                          Ibid, p. 445

"This girl..."

...she bent reality around her like a lens bending light, she pleated it into so many flickering layers that you could never tell which one you were looking at, the longer you stared the dizzier you got."

                                               Tana French, The Likeness, p. 386

"...the most important thing about these four: just how close they were. The phone videos hadn't been able to catch the power of it.... It was like a shimmer in the air between them, like glittering web-fine threads tossed back and forth and in and out until every movement or word reverberated through the whole group: Rafe passing Abby her smokes almost before she glanced around for them, Daniel turning with this hands out ready to take the steak dish in the same second that Justin brought it through the door, sentences flicked onto each other like playing cards with never a fraction of a pause. Rob and I used to be like that: seamless."

                                                Ibid, p. 112

"The house had the effortlessly off-kilter feel of something out of a storybook - I kept expecting to fall down a secret staircase, or come out of a room into a completely new corridor that only existed on alternate Mondays. I worked fast: I couldn't make myself slow down, couldn't shake the feeling that somewhere in the attic a huge clock was counting down, great handfuls of seconds tumbling away."

                                                   Ibid, p. 127

She talks, just to please him.

...    She says she stays in the town in the summer. She lives not far away, in the university town where she was born. She's a provincial.
     She's very fond of the sea, and especially this part of the coast. She hasn't got a place of her own here. She lives in a hotel. She prefers that; it's better, in the summer. From the point of view of housekeeping, breakfast, lovers.
     He starts to listen. He's the sort of man who listens to everything he's told with equal passion. You can't make out why."

                                        Marguerite Duras, Blue Eyes, Black Hair, p. 43

"A basement shopping mall...

...will connect Xanadu with Valhalla and Nirvana. It is still a gloomy underpass, lit by roadworker lamps and strewn with tarpaulins, tiles, wood planking, sheet glass, and a prematurely delivered army of boutique dummies huddled naked in misty polyethylene. Morino is ahead, a megaphone in one hand. Mama-san walks behind me, and the horn players bring up the rear. Somewhere above my head in the real world, Ai Imajo is playing Mozart....Down here is chilly and damp. I sneeze. My throat feels tight. Finally we climb to the surface on a dead escalator."

                                                     David Mitchell, Number 9 Dream, p. 178

"There is an aura of intriguing mystery about...

...this woman of Calcutta. No one is quite sure what she does with her time. She seldom entertains, especially here in her official residence overlooking the Ganges, which dates back to the time of the East India company. Nevertheless, it is presumed that she must do something. Was it only after eliminating every other possible alternative that it was decided that she was a great reader? Yes. What else could she be doing, shut up in her private apartments, during the hours between tennis and her evening drive. Crates of books, addressed to her, have been known to arrive from France."
               
                                                         Marguerite Duras, The Vice-Consul, p.71