Close Quotes (page 26)
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Like no one else,' I told him in a letter written at the end of July, 'you share that part of my mind that associates itself mostly with ideal things and places....The impression thinking about you gives me is very closely linked with that given me by a lonely hillside or a sunny afternoon or wind on the moorlands or rich music...or books that have meant more to me than I can explain, or the smell of the earth after a shower or the calmness of the sky at sunset....This is grand, but still it...
Vera Brittain
Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Once I passed through a populous city imprinting my
brain for future use with its shows, architecture,
customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I
Casually met there who detained me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together—all else
Has long been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung
To me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me...
Walt Whitman
Behind him she saw something which by contrast with the alien incalculable figure before her, was close and real. It was something which she understood, something which she could never do without, or be without, for it seemed as though it were her own self, her own body, at which she gazed and which lay so intimately upon the skyline. Gormenghast. The long, notched outline of her home. It was now his background. It was a screen of walls and towers pocked with windows. He stood against it, an...
Mervyn Peake