St. Jude: that prosperous midwestern gerontocracy, that patron saint of the really desperate. The big houses and big cars here filled up only on holidays. Rain pasted yellow leaves to cars parked

Jermyn Street, gaslit and foggy on this rainy evening in 1901, pleased Mr. Santayana in its resemblance to a John Atkinson Grimshaw, correct and gratifyingly English

Bob Darling spent the day and the evening on the fastest train in Europe. The train lugged slowly through yellow towns, then it began to pull together its force and go. 

Goody Yates was a mess. He shambled along the side of the road, slump-shouldered and bleeding from the mouth, his head stuffed with cotton, pain and delirium duking it out in the pit of his mind. 

The room fills gradually, there are many French entomologists and a few from abroad, among them a Czech in his sixties who people say is some prominent figure in the new regime

The first time we try to deliver the Gold Crown the lights are on in the house but no one lets us in. I bang on the front door and Wayne hits the back and I can hear our double drum shaking the windows

The last thing I heard about Cerutti was that he’d died (which is, of course, the last thing we hear about anybody). In Africa, or more precisely, in Kangala. I knew the country — and Malabo, its capital

I used to write stories that had lakes, that had deep blue waters shelled by the sky; water mucky and full of disease; I wrote stories where people used to break down and cry unbidden, unprovoked, just because of the way a stone looked when it was wet, or the way the wind ruffled the grass;

The man in the dog suit whines outside the door.

“Again?” sighs my mother.

“Where’s my gun?” says my dad.

The first deer went through the ice when I was out in the barn working. It was January. Martha came running out of the cabin to tell me. She saw it all.