fiction

Evan ran his finger across the faded leather spines. He laughed at how silly some of the names were: Paint Your Roses Red, Edelweiss and Me, World of Mushrooms and Fungi, The Toadstool Diaries, Daffodils Unseen and Exotic Plants Unleashed, to name but a few.

the bleakest situations bring out the hospitality in all of us, but it's during the harshest we find out how strong we really are.

The preliminaries were out of the way, the creative process was about to begin. The creative process, that mystic life force, that splurge out of which has come the Venus de Milo, the Mona Lisa, the Fantasie Impromptu, the Bayeux tapestries, Romeo and Juliet, the windows of Chartres Cathedral, Paradise Lost - and a pulp murder story by Dan Moody. The process is the same in all; if the results are a little uneven, that doesn't invalidate the basic similarity of origin.

What stories can do, I guess, is make things present.I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and God. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again.

[_] there exists around the written world opened by the work a multitude of other possible worlds, which we can complete by means of our images and our words. Denying oneself this work of completion in the name of some hypothetical fidelity to the work is bound to fail: we can indeed reject filling these gaps in a conscious way, but we cannot prevent our unconscious from finishing the work, according to its priorities and those of the era in which it was written.

They were in a long line, an endless line, and as they burst from the wood there was an instant, the smallest part of a heartbeat, when all Catelyn saw was the moonlight on the point of their lance, as if a thousand willowisps were coming down the ridge, wreathed in silver. Then she blinked, and they were only men, rushing down to kill or die.

there are some some times in life where you have to let your feelings go and do what must be done

That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder")

Gina was beautiful like a sunset. You see it and you think of how beautiful it is, and then it__ over and you move on. But Trista was beautiful like a song. The kind of song you play over and over and never get sick of hearing. The kind of song he wanted to write for her, but he knew he would never be able to string together the right combination of notes to show her how he really felt.

I look at the human sciences as poetic sciences in which there is no objectivity, and I see film as not being objective, and cinema verite as a cinema of lies that depends on the art of telling yourself lies. If you__e a good storyteller then the lie is more true than reality, and if you__e a bad one, the truth is worse than a half lie.

My heart started racing, not the bad kind of heart racing, like I'm going to die. But the good kind of heart racing, like, Hello, can I help you with something? If not, please step aside because I'm about to kick the shit out of life.

She shook her head. She was so pale under the diffuse lamp-light that she looked almost transparent, as if Simon could have looked right through her. The way, he supposed, he always had.

Respect the dead, learn from them, do not follow or avenge them.

I have yet to face Writer's Block and I don't believe I ever will. It is much more difficult for me to shut my imagination down to get a good nights sleep than it is to prod it to life.

According to Adam One, the Fall of Man was multidimensional. The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating. Then they fell from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; from simple signals into complex grammar, and thus into humanity; from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; and from seasonal mating into an incessant sexual twitching. Then they fell from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future.

The wind blowing through the cracks in the walls was fitting for this isolated and lonely place.

An ear-splitting screech pierced the silence, followed by another, striking his ears like metal against a hollow bell. The woosh woosh of wind being displaced brought Andrew__ attention skyward, and a glacial gust of paralyzing terror raced up his spine. The creature opened its mouth, and a blazing shaft of fire bellowed from above. Andrew barely had enough time to back beneath an awning for protection. Egnatious and Sebastian dove to the side while Firen sidestepped her impending doom, raising the katana in challenge.The screeching returned, except now the howls were coming from every direction.Firen__ chest heaved. __id you see that?_ she asked, her stormy eyes glinting with rapture and daring as she held her katana out, preparing for the next attack.__id I see the dragon?_ Sebastian asked, hysteria dangerously rising to the surface. He stood and brushed himself off. __es, I bloody well did see that enormous, scaly, fire-breathing dragon.

I just don't want them to change me, if I'm going to die I still want to be me.