Moo

How could she pursue the transcendence and virtue of the intellectual life when her mind had disappeared into her body like a sponge into a basin of ink?

It was the exact combination of the ephemeral and the eternal that a dying man needed to know about.

Eavesdropping is a habit fiction writers get into. Fiction writing will lead you into a number of socially unacceptable practices.

The thick, sugary covering of the snow.

She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.