Bits of love strewn online

Purpose matters in all things. Humor needs to give shape to an idea of some kind.

“I want to be the heroine of my own life.”

When tears stung her face she knew that they did not come from relief at his return, or frustration or pain in knowing that whatever had brought him here now, he would certainly leave again. Beneath relief and pain was a peculiar, unfamiliar sort of hope. Life must be lived.

They walked for hours, talking and laughing, a little flushed, each of them uncertain, she thought. They had known each other for years, doing chores and studying side-by-side, and he’d taught her to ride. But they had never done this. They had never simply been together for the sake of that alone. When she looked aside at him as they walked, she felt like she was tumbling through air.

And when had God decided that after a life of maidenly quietude she had sinned so greatly that she deserved to again meet the single person who could make her sin again?

“You’re not eating your cake.” She smiled at him and picked up her fork. “I guess I’m full of wine.” And sticky, scary love.

He was sin in human form. No wonder they called him the Devil’s Own. Lucifer probably paid him to advertise.

‘You won’t be my weakness,’ she said. ‘Yet you are already mine.’

'Of course, I love you, but what good does that do either of us?!'

Books aren’t the end of a conversation. They are the start of one.

I never knew what love was, but I recognize the joyful weight in my heart and the abject terror that you will leave me.

Her heart stopped, so quiet she could hear it whispering to her, sighing in surprised happiness.

I may be perverse, but (as an author) I find bad reviews vivifying, emboldening. It is a contest, after all – a contest of ideas and aesthetics and sensibilities – and we shouldn’t be precious about it.

So I educate myself in public, which I take to be the reviewer’s privilege.

…the dead didn't depart this world, not really. They were the tears in the well of the heart, drawn in a heavy pail and tipped into the eyes. They were fragments of dreams left upon a pillow; they were the secret ache of which no-one spoke, but which remained in the soul.