braided in your eyelashes
“You push the door open: you don’t expect any of them to be latched, you know thay all open at a push. The scattered lights are braided in your eyelashes, as if you were seeing them through a silken net. All you can make out are the dozens of flickering lights. At last you can see that they’re votive lights, all set on brackets or hung between unevenly spaced panels. They cast a faint glow on the silver objects, the crystal flasks, the gilt-framed mirrors. Then you see the bed in the shadows beyond, and the feeble movement of a hand that seems to be beckoning you.”
—Carlos Fuentes, Aura, 1965.
like white elephants
“The girl was looking off at the line of hills. They were white in the sun and the country was brown and dry.
‘They look like white elephants,’ she said.”
—Ernest Hemingway, Hills Like White Elephants, 1927.
toward the moon
“There was a fish jumping and a star shining and the lights around the lake were gleaming. . . .
‘Go faster,’ she called, ‘fast as it’ll go.’
Obediently he jammed the lever forward and the white spray mounted at the bow. When he looked around again the girl was standing up on the rushing board, her arms spread wide, her eyes lifted toward the moon.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Winter Dreams, 1922.
blank verse
—Walt Kelly, from the daily Pogo comic strip, May 12, 1951. Republished, as is the entire year, in Outrageously Pogo, 1985.
about that orange
“‘Maybe it was just the way we felt then, but I think the sun set differently that night, filtering through the clouds like a big paintbrush making the top of the town all orange. And suddenly I thought what if the tops of our houses were that kind of orange, what a world it would be, Howard, and my God, that orange stayed until the last drop of light was left in it. . . . The feeling we had about that orange, Howard, that was ours and that’s what I’ve tried to bring to every house, the way we felt that night.’”
—Max Apple, from The Oranging of America, 1974. And so the orange Howard Johnson’s roof was born.
all the beautiful green eyes you’ve ever known
“You move a few steps so that the light from the candles won’t blind you. The girl keeps her eyes closed, her hands at her sides. She doesn’t look at you at first, then little by little she opens her eyes as if she were afraid of the light. Finally you can see that those eyes are sea green and that they surge, break to foam, grow calm again, then surge again like a wave. You look into them and tell yourself it isn’t true, because they’re beautiful green eyes just like all the beautiful green eyes you’ve ever known. But you can’t deceive yourself: those eyes do surge, do change, as if offering you a landscape that only you can see and desire.”
—Carlos Fuentes, from the short story Aura, 1965.
The sky is neither high nor low
“Sitting on the bed, you try to make out the source of that diffuse, opaline light that hardly lets you distinguish the objects in the room, and the presence of Aura, from the golden atmosphere that surrounds them. She sees you looking up, trying to find where it comes from. You can tell from her voice that she’s kneeling down in front of you.
‘The sky is neither high nor low. It’s over us and under us at the same time.’”
—Carlos Fuentes, Aura, 1965.
the bright snowy night
“The moon was sailing higher and higher and the frost was tightening its grip in the bright snowy night.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1978; translated from the Russian by H.T. Willetts, 1991.
a little lamp
“All the lamps were dim, and the huts cast black shadows. The entrance to the mess hut was up four steps and across a wide porch, also now in the shadows. But a little lamp swayed above it, squeaking in the cold. Frost, or dirt, gave every lightbulb a rainbow-coloured halo.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1978; translated from the Russian by H.T. Willetts, 1991.
crossed beams
“The mist in the frosty air took your breath away. Two big searchlights from watchtowers in opposite corners crossed beams as they swept the compound. Lights were burning around the periphery, and inside the camp, dotted around in such numbers that they made the stars look dim.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, 1978; translated from the Russian by H.T. Willetts, 1991.