| 1 |
It must have been on one of those September days when we were there in the woods gathering roots that Dolly said: Do you hear? That is the grass harp, always telling a story - it knows the stories of all the people on the hill, of all the people who ever lived, and when we are dead it will tell ours, too. |
| 2 |
The nearest winter came was to frost the windows with its zero blue breath. If some wizard would like to make me a present, let him give me a bottle filled with the voices of that kitchen, the ha ha ha and fire whispering, a bottle brimming with its buttery sugary bakery smells - though Catherine smelled like a sow in the spring. |
| 3 |
But it's the truth that within two years she'd stretched me from four feet nine to five feet seven, and I can prove it by the breadknife notches on the pantry door, for even now when so much has gone, when there is only wind in the stove and winter in the kitchen, those growing-up scars are still there, a testimony. |
| 4 |
Verena, too, could make the kitchen sad, as she was always introducing a new rule or enforcing an old one: do, don't, stop, start: it was as though we were clocks she kept an eye on to see that our time jibed with her own, and woe if we were ten minutes fast, an hour slow: Verena went off like a cuckoo. |
| 5 |
Then one year we totaled up and found we'd earned enough to have to pay an income tax. Whereupon Verena began asking questions: money was like a wildcat whose trail she stalked with a trained hunter's muffled step and an eye for every broken twig. What, she wanted to know, went into the medicine? |
| 6 |
And she must have meant it, for one Christmas morning she locked the bathroom door and tried to drown her two little girls in the tub: it was said that Riley broke the door down with a hatchet, which seems a tall order for a boy of nine or ten, whatever he was. |
| 7 |
Later, we all went to the creek and bathed our feet and faces in the cold water. There are as many creeks in River Woods as there are veins in a leaf: clear, crackling, they crook their way down into the little river that crawls through the woods like a green alligator. |
| 8 |
You wrong, sugar. If you feed a man, and wash his clothes, and born his children, you and that man are married, that man is yours. If you sweep a house, and tend its fires and fill its stove, and there is love in you all the years you are doing this, then you and that house are married, that house is yours. |
| 9 |
He unloosened from his vest a gold watch and chain, then lassoed the chain to a strong twig above his head; it hung like a Christmas ornament, and its feathery faded ticking might have been the heartbeat of a delicate thing, a firefly, a frog. 'If you can hear time passing it makes the day last longer. I've come to appreciate a long day'. |
| 10 |
'It may be that there is no place for any of us. Except we know there is, somewhere; and if we found it, but lived there only a moment, we could count ourselves blessed. This could be your place,' he said, shivering as though in the sky spreading wings had cast a cold shade. |
| 11 |
At least, then, a spirit, someone not to be calculated by the eye alone. Spirits are accepters of life, they grant its differences - and consequently are always in trouble. Myself, I should never have been a Judge; as such, I was too often on the wrong side: the law doesn't admit differences. |
| 12 |
Big Eddie Stover, three grown men, cronies of the Sheriff, were dragging and slapping her through the grass. I wanted to kill them; and Catherine was trying to: but she didn't stand a chance - though she butted them with her head, bounced them with her elbows. Big Eddie Stover was legally born a bastard; the other two made the grade on their own. |
| 13 |
But I knew myself. No matter what passions compose them, all private worlds are good, they are never vulgar places: Dolly had been made too civilized by her own, the one she shared with Catherine and me, to feel the winds of wickedness that circulate elsewhere: No, Dolly, the world is not a bad place. |
| 14 |
This clock has always run a half-hour fast. Once an expert was imported to repair it; at the end of almost a week's tinkering he recommended, as the only remedy, a stick of dynamite; the town council voted he be paid in full, for there was a general feeling of pride that the clock had proved so incorrigible. |
| 15 |
I loved him, I did. Not in a womanly way; it was, oh I admit it, that we were kindred spirits. We looked each other in the eye, we saw the same devil, we weren't afraid; it was merry. But he outsmarted me; I'd known he could, and hoped he wouldn't, and he did, and now: it's too long to be alone, a lifetime. |
| 16 |
If in other ways he was a disappointed man, it was not because of Dolly, for I believe she became what he'd wanted, the one person in the world to whom, as he'd described it, everything can be said. But when everything can be said perhaps there is nothing more to say. |
Комментарии
В "Английский. RSS News.com" очень сложная (и почти всегда компьютерная) лексика.
В "Phrases" нет никакой внутренней логики, что тоже часто сбивает с толку. %)
И еще несколько частотных...
На мой взгляд, в этом словаре цитаты могли бы быть и покороче;)
А так - спасибо, клевый словарь, будем гонять!