Fred Chappell

“Perhaps I had missed a great deal, reading so continually and seeing the world through the windowpanes of books. But then, maybe not. If books had made up a large part of the experience of my youth, it only meant that what I’d missed in immediacy of experience, I’d gained in variety, looking so widely into the thought…s and dreams of others, of travelers and sages, of soldiers and scholars and all the mighty dead.”

“Shall the water not remember Embermy hand’s slow gesture, tracing above ofits mirror my half-imaginary airyportrait? My only belonging longing;is my beauty, which I take acheaway and then return, as love ofteasing playfully the one being unbeing.whose gratitude I treasure Is yourmoves me. I live apart heartfrom myself, yet cannot notlive apart. In the water’s tone, stone?that brilliant silence, a flower Hour,whispers my name with such slight light:moment, it seems filament of air, farethe world becomes cloudswell. well.”

“In an almost totally insentient cosmos only human feeling is interesting or relevant to what the soul searches for...suffering is the most expensive of human emotions, but it is the most intense and precious of them, because suffering most efficiently humanizes the unfeeling universe.”

“The light was grainy, dusty; it looked like the Milky Way had spread from the top of the sky all down the west, and the tented shapes of the mountains were huge and satin black against it, and the ridgeline trees made a filigree of onyx. The wind had increased but not cooled; the promise of full summer was in it. And when Dr. Barcroft turned from the west to look again at the house, he was hardly surprised to see that it had begun to turn like a wheel upon a vertical axle as the silhouettes of the dancers raced past window after window. It was as if their dancing, the female slide and shuffle, the masculine drum and thunder, propelled the house behind them; it had become a merry-go-round, turning steadily and stately as the music went just a little bit faster, just a little more, and he could tell there were furies in it, whirlwinds and cyclones and hurricanes that Quigley's fiddle barely held in check, that his calling could barely control. ”

“Our thoughts were so awesome to us, that no one could speak a word, not even ‘Goodbye.’ We hugged and clasped and wept silently.”

“There were too many things suddenly that I didn’t understand, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I knew that I needed to be older, but that’s not enough. You have to have some basic information that was not yet available to me.”

“The tear on my mother’s cheek got larger and larger. It detached from her face and became a shiny globe, widening outward like an inflating balloon. At first the tear floated in the air between them, but as it expanded it took my mother and father into itself. I saw them suspended, separate but beginning to slowly drift towards one another. Then my mother looked past my father’s shoulder, looked through the bright skin of the tear, at me. The tear enlarged until at last, it took me in, too. It was warm and salt. As soon as I got used to the strange light inside the tear, I began to swim clumsily towards my parents.”