Up: [[Words, Beautiful and Otherwise]] Created: 2022-06-10 Updated: 2026-08-13 > [!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) > [!Orbit] Maria Popova in *The Marginalian* > … the cult of productivity turns each minute into a blade pressed against the vein of our transience. *weekly digest*, [[2026-03-08]] > [!Orbit] Karen Connelly in *One Room in a Castle: Letters from Spain, France & Greece* > I love the beginning of the rain because it quickens the people on the streets all at once, like a conductor rousing an entire orchestra. They seem to wake from slowness and move suddenly, gracefully, within a plan. Their eyes get wider, darker, brighter, their faces becomes light. This unexpected grace in strangers’ faces allows me to image they are gentle. (p. 215, this was in France) > [!Orbit] Karen Connelly in *One Room in a Castle: Letters from Spain, France & Greece"* > Nothing equals these fields at night when the moon is coming round, when every stone is a diamond with its own velvet pouch of shadow. There is a time between dusk and moonrise when the sky ascends into itself; each time you blind another star appears. Then, slowly, the light of the stars is drowned by the greater brightness of the moon. Luminous, unearthly blue floods the sky. The edges of the hills and broken stones shine like scythes. (p. 371, this was in Greece) > [!Orbit] Allen Levi in *Theo of Golden*, describing the sanctuary of a church > The architecture of the place inside and out was a celebration of lines and angles, of stone and wood and glass, of mundane materials used majestically in celebration of order and mystery. It was a manifesto of beauty. (p. 152)