"When you open a book," the sentimental library posters said, "anything can happen." This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone's way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one. --Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

I would like to live to be a hunded because loving and being loved are so good and there are so many books; but were I to learn now that I had only a week left, I would finish today's spell of writing, have the cup of coffee that I crave and go on with the one book I'm reading. --John Tittensor, Year One: A Record

March 25, 2012

The Princetta

by Anne-Laure Bondoux

The waves lapping at the rocks made their perpetual murmur. Above the ship the sun was still shining, but down below, the crew was crushed by the weight of a terrible truth: in both the Known and the Unknown Worlds, living things could die, suffer, love, hate, struggle or surrender. Only nature itself never changed. Despite tragedy and torment, there would always be the waves, and the sun would always rise and set.
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March 18, 2012

Hush

by Donna Jo Napoli

The day goes on in slow, deliberate work. The people pull together, letting go of their grief. Either these are callous folk or they know a bottomless well of courage.
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March 2, 2012

Metapatterns

by Tyler Volk

Borders function as bulwarks against forces of disruption. They cloak creatures and their internal parts against the ravages of the exterior world--the ionizing, lysing, dissolving, jolting, combusting, dispersing, bursting, rotting, eating, and crushing world. Borders hold at bay all that would destroy the difference between being and environment; they prevent universal homogenization.
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