Odds, Bobs, Hammer and Tongs

“My beloved Laura” (said she to me a few Hours before she died) “take warning from my unhappy End and avoid the imprudent conduct which has occasioned it…Beware of fainting-fits… Though at the time they may be refreshing and Agreable yet believe me they will in the end, if too often repeated and at improper seasons, prove destructive to your Constitution…My fate will teach you this…I die a Martyr to my greif for the loss of Augustus….One fatal swoon has cost me my Life…Beware of swoons, Dear Laura…A frenzy fit is not one quarter so pernicious; it is an exercise to the Body and if not too violent, is I dare say conducive to Health in its consequences—Run mad as often as you chuse; but do not faint—”. 

Wherever magicians used to go. Behind the sky. On the other side of the rain.

When asked where the various doors led to, he gave it as his opinion that one door led to America, another Everlasting Perdition and a third might possibly be the way to next Friday.

Life is a gate, a way, a path to paradise anyway. Why not live for fun and joy or some sort of girl by a fireside? Why not go to your desire and laugh…

It was a dream, one of the dreams she had almost every night. Dreams in which she saw his face so clearly that she touched it in her sleep, and next day her fingers still remembered his skin. Even when he put his arms around her, carefully, as if he wasn’t sure whether he had forgotten how to hold her, she didn’t move—because her hands did not believe they would really feel him, her arms did not believe they could hold him again. But her eyes could see him. Her ears heard him breathing. Her skin felt his, as warm as if the fire were inside him, after he had been so terribly cold.

For love is like a tree, it grows of its own accord, it puts down deep roots into our whole being, and often continues to put out leaves over a heart in ruins.

He had wanted her respect, her friendship – an oasis of wit and grace in a desert of provincial dullness. He wanted the aliveness he felt in her presence, which flowed through him like a fine wine.

“No problem!” cried Butt the Hoopoe. “Any story worth its salt can handle a little shaking up.”