He had a sensation of anxiety and shame, a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage, must record every touch of pain.

Her sentences march under a harsh sun that bleaches color from them but bestows a peculiar, invigorating, Pascalian clarity.

But for a few phrases from his letters and an odd line or two of his verse, the poet walks gagged through his own biography.

The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion.