"Soft and moist, a hanging heat. ...

...People still came, talking, looking out to sea. They stood around the horn player, the man with the hand drums. There were sellers of invisible commodities, names whispered in the dark. Children kept appearing from the edges, silently crossing some margin or dividing line, cradling the shriveled infants. People drifted toward the Gateway from the street along the sea wall, from the inner streets, the edges, to stand in the warm night together and wait for a breeze. The sound of bicycle bells struck briefly to the air."

                                            Don DeLillo, The Names, page 256.

"In the light of a lowering sky...

...the city is immediate and sculptured. None of summer's white palls, its failures of distance and perspective. There are shadow-angles, highlighted surfaces, areas of grayish arcs and washes. laundry blows on rooftops and balconies. Against an urgent sky, with dull thunder pounding over the gulf, this washwork streaming in the wind can be an emblematic and touching thing. Always the laundry, always the lone old woman in black who keeps to a corner of the elevator, the bent woman in endless mourning. She disturbs the composure of the modern building with its intercom and carpeted lobby, its marble veneer."

                                    Don DeLillo, The Names, page 175.

New Hampshire - Who Knew?

It's a perfect early autumn late afternoon. Clear skies. This is the Laconia Public Library. It's just gorgeous.

"You do look, my son, in a moved sort...

...As if you were dismayed. Be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. Sir, I am vexed.
Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled.
Be not disturbed with my infirmity.
If you be pleased, retire into my cell
And there repose. A turn or two I'll walk
To still my beating mind."

                                William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1

"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