Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land

 'The fog thickens and the quality of the moonlight dims. Pigeons coo somewhere above the broken roof. She whispers a prayer to Saint Koralia, ties the sack, hauls it down the stairs, crawls through the scupper, down-climbs the wall, and drops into the boat without a word. Gaunt and shivering, Himerius rows them back to the harbor, and the charcoal in the brazier burns out, and the icy fog seems to cinch down around them like a trap. Beneath the archway into the Venetian quarter, there are no men-at-arms, and when they reach the house of the Italians, everything is dark. In the courtyard the fig tree stands glazed with ice, the geese nowhere to be seen. Boy and girl shiver against the wall and Ana wills the sun to rise."

(Scribner, Page 230 Kindle version.)




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Favorite Paragraphs

 Back in the 1990's, Yahoo rolled out an amazing tool.  It was called Geocities.  You could publish your own websites, imagine that!  Nowadays, this is no big deal, but in the 1990's, this was mind blowing. It was free as well. I used to have a really great website for my favorite paragraphs.  I read a lot, more back then, so every time I came across a paragraph I loved, in fiction usually, I added it to my web site. I must had about 50 paragraphs posted ranging from Herman Hesse, Henry Miller and Douglas Adams.   It got away from me. Life happened. In 2009, I received an email that Geocities was going away.  I need to back up my website. I did not and I lost it.  I don't know what going with me in 2009. I was probably very busy with work, maybe I was depressed.  I just can't explain it.  No excuses. It is about time I resurrect this project.  I am starting with Hemingway and Conrad because those are the two works of fiction th...
Read more

Elizabeth Stout

Image
Olive Kitteridge  "And then the little plane climb higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in the morning sun, farther out the coast line, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats --- then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water ---- seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life, the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed. She had been asked to be part of her son's life."  (Random House Trade Paperbacks, Page 202 and 203)
Read more

William Kennedy

Image
 Ironweed "When Francis opened the trunk lid the odor of lost time filled the attic air, a cloying reek of imprisoned flowers that unsettled the dust and fluttered the window shades. Francis felt drugged by the scent of the reconstituted past, and then stunned by his first look inside the trunk, for there, staring out from a photo, was his own face at age nineteen. The picture lay among rolled socks and a small American flag, a Washington Senators cap, a pile of newspaper clippings and other photos, all in a scatter on the trunk's tray. Francis stared up at himself from the bleachers in Chadwick Park on a day in 1899, his face unlined, his teeth all there, his collar open, his hair unruly in the afternoon's breeze. He lifted the picture for a closer look and saw himself among a group of men, tossing a baseball from bare right hand to gloved left hand. The flight of the ball had always made this photo mysterious to Francis, for the camera had caught the ball clutched in one...
Read more