The old woman lifted the well-lid, took hold the chain, and began drawing up the heavy bucket. As she did so, she sang. Figures shifted, restlesslike, between lamp and window, in the front rooms of the shanties. Shadows of the figures fought each other on
Cane-Toomer
White men like ants upon a forage rushed about. Except for the taut human of their moving, all was silent. Shotguns, revolvers, kerosene, torches. Two high-powered cars with glaring searchlights. They came together.
Cane-Toomer
The mob yelled. Its yell echoed against the skeleton stone walls and sounded like a hundred yells. Like a hundred mobs yelling.
Cane-Toomer
that the sexes were made to mate is the practice of the South. Particularly, black folks were made to mate
Cane-Toomer
Her animalism, still unconquered by zoo-restrictions and keeper-taboos, stirs him. Passion tilts upward, bringing with it the elements of an old desire.
Cane-Toomer
I wont let myself. I? Mrs. Pribby who reads newspapers all night wont. What has she got to do with me. She is me, somehow. No she's not. Yes she is. She is the town, and the town wont let me love you, Dan
Cane-Toomer
His mind curves back into himself, and picks up tail-ends of experiences.
Cane-Toomer
Strange I never really noticed him bfore. Been sitting there for years. Born a slave. Slavery not so long ago. He'll die in his chair...knows everyone who passes the corners. Saw the first horse-cars. The first oldsmobile. And he was born in slavery. I di
Cane-Toomer
some little white-ant biddies came an tied [a man's] feet to chains. They led him t th coast, they led him t th sea, they led him across the ocean an they didn't set him free.
Cane-Toomer
th sin th white folks 'mitted when they made the Bible lie
Cane-Toomer
she turns him to her and takes his hot cheeks in her firm cold hands. Her palms draw the fever out. He sink to his knees before her, ashamed, exhausted. His eyes squeeze tight.
Cane-Toomer
outside, the sun arises from its cradle in the tree-tops of the forest. Shadows of pines are dreams, he sun shakes from its eyes. The sun arises. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and send a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy wi
Cane-Toomer
I came back to tell you, brother, that white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk. That I am going out and gather petals. That I am going out and know her whom I brought here with me to these gardens which are purple like a bed or
Cane-Toomer
she imagined how in the chambers of the mind and heart of the woman who was, physically, touching her, were stood, like the treasures in the tombs of kings, tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out, would teach one everything
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
How, then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the domeshaped hive, ranged the wastes o
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
it was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then this splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by o
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
she let it uphold her and sustain her, this admirable fabric of the masculine intelligence, which ran up and down, crossed this way and that, like iron girders spanning the swaying fabric, upholding the world
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
there was no beauty anywhere. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. Again she felt, as a fact without hostility, the sterility of men, for if she did not do it
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
now all the candles were lit up, and the faces on both sides of the table were brought nearer by the candle light, and composed, as they had not been in the twilight, into a party round a table, for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which far
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
it could not last, she knew, but at the moment her eyes were so clear that they seemed to go around the table unveiling each of these people, and their thoughts and their feelings, without effort like a light stealing under water so that its ripples and t
To the Lighthouse-Woolf
the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash
to the lighthouse-woolf
but he must read it again. He could not remember the whole shape of the thing. He had to keep his judgment in suspense
to the lighthouse woolf
all the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire; she held it in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, here�the sonnet
to the lighthouse woolf
the mind is full of monstrous, hybrid, unmanageable emotions. That the age of the earth is 3 billion years; that the human life lasts but a second; that the capacity of the human mind is nevertheless boundless...; that science and religion have between th
to the lighthouse woolf
can prose, we may ask, adequate though it is to deal with the common and complex�can prose say the simple things which are so tremendous? Give the sudden emotions which are so surprising? Can it chant the elegy, or hymn the love, or shriek in terror, or p
to the lighthouse woolf
but she could not do it; she could not say it. Then, knowing that he was watching her, instead of saying anything she turned, holding her stocking, and the looked at him. And as she looked at him she began to smile, for though she had not said a word, he
to the lighthouse woolf
and smiling she looked out of the window and said (thinking to herself, nothing on earth can equal this happiness)�"yes, you were right. It's going to be wet tomorrow. You wont be able to go." And she looked at him smiling. For she had triumphed again. Sh
to the lighthouse woolf
Could it be, even for elderly people, that this was life?�starting, the unexpected, unknown? For one moment she felt that if they both got up, here, now on the lawn, and demanded an explanation, why was it so short, why was it so inexplicable, said it wit
to the lighthouse woolf
night after night, summer and winter...from the upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of leviathans..., a
to the lighthouse woolf
What do you want? They both wanted to ask. They both wanted to say, ask us anything and we will give it to you. But he did not ask them anything. He sat and looked at the island and he might be thinking, we perished, each alone, or he might be thinking, I
to the lighthouse woolf
that woman sitting there writing under the rock resolved everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite something�t
to the lighthouse woolf
In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the clouds going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stands still here,
to the lighthouse woolf
It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? She asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if
to the lighthouse woolf
If the feather had fallen, if it had tipped the scale downwards, the whole house would have plunged to the depths to lie upon the sands of oblivion. But there was a force working; something not highly conscious; something that leered, something that lurch
to the lighthouse woolf
As if it were stroking with its silver fingers some sealed vessel in her brain whose bursting would flood her with delight, she had known happiness, exquisite happiness, intense happiness, and it silvered the rough waves a little more brightly, as dayligh
to the lighthouse woolf
One must keep on looking without for a second relaxing the intensity of emotion, the determination not to be put off, not to be bamboozled. One must hold the scene�so�in a vise and let nothing come in and spoil it. One wanted, she thought, dipping her bru
to the lighthouse woolf
I would think of sin as I would think of the clothes we both wore in the world's face of the circumspection necessary because he was he and I was I; the sin more utter and terrible since he was the instrument ordained by God who created the sin, to sancti
AILD Faulkner
She prayed for me b/c she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, b/c people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
AILD Faulkner
But it is better so for him. This world is not his world, this life his life.
AILD Faulkner
In the early spring it was the worst. Sometimes I thought that I could not bear it, lying in bed at night, with the wild geese going north and their honking coming faint and high and wild out of the wild darkness
AILD Faulkner
I would hate my father for having ever planted me. I would look forward to the times when they faulted, so I could whip them. When the switch fell I could feel it upon my flesh; when it welted and ridged it was my blood that ran, and I would think with ea
AILD Faulkner
I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time
AILD Faulkner
in the afternoon when school was out and the last one had left with his dirty snuffling nose, instead of going home I would go down the hill to the spring where I could be quiet and hate them.
AILD Faulkner
b/c there just aint nothing justifies the deliberate destruction of what a man has built with his own sweat and stored the fruit of his sweat into
AILD Faulkner
Sometimes I aint so sho who's got ere a right say when a man is crazy and when he aint sometimes I think it aint none of us pure crazy and aint none of us pure sane until the balance of us talks him that-a-way. Its like it aint so much what a fellow does,
AILD Faulkner
How often I have lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home
AILD Faulkner
And they begun to threaten me out of him, trying to short-hand me with the law
AILD Faulkner
It talks up to us in a murmur become ceaseless and myriad, the yellow surface dimpled monstrously into fading swirls travelling along the surface for an instant, silent, impermanent and profoundly significant, as though just beneath the surface something
AILD Faulkner
I set out deliberately to write a tour-de-force, he claimed later. Before I ever put pen to paper and set down the first words, I knew what the last word would be...before I began, I said, I am going to write a book by which, at a pinch, I can stand or fa
AILD Faulkner
It is as though upon a face carved by a savage caricaturist a monstrous burlesque of bereavement flowed
AILD Faulkner
So I left them squatting there. I reckon after four days they was used to it. But Rachel wasn't. Its an outrage, she says. An outrage.
AILD Faulkner
Pick up! Pick up, ******* your thick-nosed soul to hell, pick up! It wont balance. It they want it to tote and ride on a balance, they will have...
AILD Faulkner
I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of his mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all
The Fish
Bishop
Poems
And then I saw that from his lower lip�if you could call it a lip
The Fish
Bishop
Poems
Everything only connected by "and" and "and
Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance
bishop
poems
While his gills were breathing in and the terrible oxygen�the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly
The Fish
Bishop
Poems
It was somewhere near there I saw what frightened me most of all: a holy grave
Over 2000 illustrations and a complete concordance
bishop
poems
I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach, and I keep my feelings to myself
Strayed Crab
bishop
poems
September rain falls on the house. In the falling light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the little marvel stove, reading jokes from the almanac laughing and talking to hide her tears
Sestina
Bishop
Poems
The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their lost is no disaster
One Art
Bishop
Poems
Then practice losing father, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch. And look! My last, or my next-to-last of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't har
One Art
Bishop
Poems
It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every german was you and the language obscene. An engine, an engine chuffing me off like a jew. A jew to dachau, Auschwitz, belsen. I began to talk like a jew. I think I ma
Daddy
Plath
Ariel
Not God but a swastika so black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a fascist, the boot in the face, the brute brute heart of a brute like you
Daddy
Plath
Ariel
If I've killed one man, I've killed two�the vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year, seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. Theres a stake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you. They are dancin
Daddy
Plath
Ariel
Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue. Pour of tor and distances. God's lioness, how one we grow, pivot of heels and knees�the furrow splits and passes, sister to the brown arc of the neck I cannot catch
Ariel
Plath
Ariel
Something else hauls me through air�thighs, hair; flakes from my heels
Ariel
plath
ariel
White godiva, I unpeel�dead hands, dead stringencies
Ariel
plath
ariel
The child's cry melts in the wall and I am the arrow, the dew that flies suicidal at one with the drive into the red eye, the cauldron of morning
Ariel
plath
ariel
Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music coups d'etat�they all arrived on the same train...and in ayemenem where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and bill Clinton could be summoned up l
God of Small Things": Roy
He could do only one thing at a time. If he held her, he couldn't kiss her. If he kissed her, he couldn't see her. If he saw her, he couldn't feel her. If he touched her, he couldn't talk to her, if he loved her he couldn't leave, if he spoke he couldn't
God of Small Things": Roy
Despite the fact that it was june and raining, the river was no more than a swollen drain now. A thin ribbon of thick water that lapped wearily at the mud banks on either side, sequined with the occasional silver slant of a dead fish. It was choked with a
God of Small Things": Roy
They laughed at the ant-bites on each other's bottoms. At clumsy caterpillars sliding off the ends of leaves at overturned beetles that couldn't right themselves.
God of Small Things": Roy
They all broke the rules. They all crossed into forbidden territory. They all tampered with the laws that lay down who should be loved and how. And how much. The laws that make grandmothers grandmothers, uncles uncles, mothers mothers, cousins cousins, ja
God of Small Things": Roy
The great stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don't deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don't surprise you with the unforeseen. You know how they end, yet y
God of Small Things": Roy
They were on their way to church. All dressed in red. They had to be killed before they got there. Squished and squashed with a stone. You cant have smelly ants in church. The ants made a faint crunchy sound as life left them. Like an elf eating toast, or
God of Small Things": Roy
He felt that she kept too close to the original text. He preferred the studied cadences of an earlier version and had said so in person and in print. She felt that he admired lyricism and empty rhetorical flourishes at the expense of accuracy and faithful
Varieties of Disturbance": Davis
All day long the old woman struggles with her house and the objects in it: the doors will not shut; the floorboards separate and the clay squeezes up b/t them; the plaster walls dampen with rain; bats fly down from the attic and invade her wardrobe; mice
Varieties of Disturbance": Davis
The cat is crying at the window. It wants to come in. you think about living with a cat and the demands of a cat make you think about simple things, like a cat's need to come indoors and how good that is. You think about this and you are too busy thinking
Varieties of Disturbance": Davis
If I've killed one man, I've killed two�the vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year, seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now. Theres a stake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you. They are dancin
Daddy
Plath
Ariel