Up: [[Words, Beautiful and Otherwise]] Created: 2022-06-10 Updated: 2026-02-08 > [!Orbit] Howard Axelrod in *The Point of Vanishing* > The sky was a wet newspaper, its headlines blurred… (p. 50) > [!Orbit] Overheard someone saying > Rainfall — “not enough to wet a stamp” > [!Orbit] Hilary Mantel in *Giving Up the Ghost: A memoir* > By early summer, when my surroundings had taken on the chewed, grainy monochrome of crumpled newsprint… > [!Orbit] Phyllis Theroux in *The Journal Keeper* > …the air in her house has the thick flavour of dust, sunlight, old books, fried chicken, and furniture polish (p. 43) > [!Orbit] Deborah Levy in *The Cost of Living* > It had started to rain. The London pavements smelt of old coins. (p. 89) > [!Orbit] Claire Keegan in *Small Things Like These* > The crowd made soft little splashes of applause… (p. 29) > [!Orbit] Jess Kidd in *Things in Jars* > His complexion is as wan and floury as an overcooked potato and his mouth was made for sneering. (p. 19) > [!Orbit] Jess Kidd in *Things in Jars* > The man who occupies it (the study) is unsteady. He’s like a rare vase, one that’s suffered a break, has been mended badly, and now, near useless, has been relegated to an occasional table in the corner. (p. 54) > [!Orbit] Reif Larsen in *The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet* > His gabardine overcoat…was tailored slightly too short, as though its creator had forgotten to carry a zero. (p. 156) > [!Orbit] Ann Patchett in *These Perfect Days* about an old inn turned into a homeless shelter > Every human catastrophe the carpet in the hallway had endured over the years had been solved with a splash of bleach, which rendered it a long, abstract painting. (p. 47) > [!Orbit] Graham Norton in *Holding* > Time didn't pass in Duneen; it seeped away." — Describing an old town that never changes (p. 6) > [!Orbit] Graham Norton in *Holding* > Some marriages combust, others die, and some just lie down like a wounded animal, defeated. (p. 12) > [!Orbit] Elizabeth Strout in *Amy and Isabelle* > Amy took an empty cart, the plastic-coated bar still warm from someone else’s hands. > [!Orbit] Jade Angeles Fitton in *Hermit* > The eaves and slats in the bell tower are a roost for ravens, which push out into the sky like belches of coal smoke. (p. 193) > [!Orbit] Terry Windling in *The Wood Wife* > There was nothing soft or hidden in the land, and it made her feel raw, overexposed, like a photograph left in the sun. (p. 54) > [!Orbit] Patti Callahan in *Becoming Mrs. Lewis* > September in Oxford is a glory of colour and silken air, of golden hues and ivy-covered hope. It was like being transported to the land of a fairy tale you’d forgotten to read. (p. 81) > [!Orbit] Philip Lopate in *Portrait of My Body* > My father fingers words like mahjong tiles, waiting to play a good one. (p. 171) > [!Orbit] Kelly McMasters in *The Leaving Season* > … the hay bales switch from tightly packed squares to giant cochlear curls, disembodied ears dotting the expansive fields, pressed to the soil, listening. (p. 81)