The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, by Rebecca Skloot, 2010
“A man sat in the passenger seat, staring straight at the road as if the car were moving…”
Trouble is What I Do, by Walter Mosley, 2020
“smiled like a benevolent, deified moon.”
“I took another taste. It was so smooth that I imagined a green snake slithering across an emerald lawn.”
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler, 1939
“It had the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.”
“She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes.”
“So [Owen’s] gun went off, as guns will, and Geiger fell down dead.”
“I hit Agnes on the head with less delicacy than before.”
“Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants…”
The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, 1912
“the ochreous haze of expiring sunlight”
“I sank into one of those gloomy fits I sometimes suffer from, on account o’ the loneliness of my domestic life, when the world seems to have the blackness of hell, and, like Job, I could curse the day that gave me birth.”
“Some folk want their luck buttered.”
“‘Michael Henchard’s Will ‘That Elizabeth-Jane Farfrae be not told of my death, or made to grieve on account of me. ‘& that I be not bury’d in consecrated ground. ‘& that no sexton be asked to toll the bell. ‘& that nobody is wished to see my dead body. ‘& that no mourners walk behind me at my funeral. ‘& that no flowers be planted on my grave. ‘& that no man remember me. ‘To this I put my name.’”
The Last Living Slut, by Roxana Shirazi, 2010
“As much as I would love to write about how gender is socially constructed, and how the concepts of masculine and feminine are merely performances that have been produced as truths and taught to us from birth, I have a story to tell.”
“The term sex always means consensual sex. Any sexual act that is not consensual is not sex; it is an act of violence.”
“When we were both done, we lay back, simmering like tender cabbage.”
“people milled around like black and red ants.”
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder, 1927
“Tidal waves were continually washing away cities; earthquakes arrived every week and towers fell upon good men and woman all the time.”
“Families lived in a wasteful atmosphere of custom and kissed one another with secret indifference.”
“The people of this world moved about in an armor of egotism, drunk with self-gazing, athirst for compliments, hearing little of what was said to them, unmoved by the accidents that befell their closest friends, in dread of all appeals that might interrupt their long communion with their own desires.”
Please visit my website at www.randystark.com and my page at Write Up The Road.