“Marriages have stages. They have incarnations, almost,” Mercy explains. “You can be in a good marriage and you can be in a bad marriage, and they can both be the same one but just at different times.”
from French Braid, by Anne Tyler, 2022
An exquisite cup, less than two inches across, of felted plant, fern or dandelion-seed down, covered so perfectly with moss and lichens and fastened with spider webs as to appear a mere protuberance on the limb, and lined with a layer of the finest down.
from Birds of America, 1936 – Garden City Publishing Company, Inc.
Once she’s locked the attic door behind her she feels a sense of release, a crack of light in the darkness. What is the name for what she’s feeling?
She wishes it were liberation.
from The Age of Light, by Whitney Scharer, 2019