Possibility Quotes (page 13)
There was a game she had played with Sophie in the long hallways of Edgewood, where she and Sophie would stand as far apart as was possible to get and still see eachother. Then they would walk slowly and deliberately, looking always each at the other's face. They kept on, at the same pace, not laughing or trying not to, till their noses touched. It was like this with Smokey, though he had started from far off, too far to be seen, coming from the City? no farther, out there where she had...
John Crowley
He was so full of wrath against grown-ups, who as usual, were spoiling everything, that as soon as he got inside his tree he breathed intentionally quick short breaths at the rate of about five to a second. He did this because there is a saying in the Neverland, that everytime you breathe, a grown-up dies; and Peter was killing them of vindictively as fast as possible.
J. M. Barrie
The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in a many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.
Cormac McCarthy
I learned to understand Czanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought possibly it was only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Czanne was probably hungry in a different way.
Ernest Hemingway
Most people's intuitions are drowned out by folk sayings. We have a moment of real feeling or insight, and then we come up with a folk saying that captures the insight in a kind of wash. The intuition may be real and ripe, fresh with possibilities, but the folk saying is guaranteed to be a cliche, stale and self-contained.
Anne Lamott
Pray , Mr Tomlinson, be seated. He took his chair over against her. I stood behind hers, that I might give him agreed-upon signals should there be occasions for them. A thus-A wink of the left eye was to signify, Push that point, captain. A wink of the right, and a nod was to indicate approbation of what he said. My forefinger held up, and biting my lip, Get off of that as fast as possible. A right forward nod, and a frown-Swear to it Captain. My whole spread hand, To take care not to say too...
Samuel Richardson
These boys, now, were living as we'd been living then, they were growing up with a rush and their heads bumped abruptly against the low ceiling of their actual possibilities. They were filled with rage. All they really knew were two darknesses, the darkness of their lives, which were now closing in on them, and the darkness of the movies, which had blinded them to that other darkness, and in which they now, vindictively, dreamed, at once more together than they were at any other time, and...
James Baldwin