It is one thing to recognise certain potentially useful affinities, and another to act on them.

A girl never can predict who might wander into her boudoir during a bubble bath.

The Jaguar's Children is a beautifully rendered lament for an imperiled culture and the brave lives that would preserve it. You should read it.

Along the wide curving moat surrounding the palace, rows of cherry trees announced the end of their seasonal beauty. Some of the trees were weeping: blossoms in white and palest pink, ponderous with decreptitude, eddying on the brown water, stirred by the paddling of ducks.

Let me begin by saying that I am one of those naturally wary people who considers the verb return a kind of insidious threat.

Beyond the terrace, a light breeze stirred the reeds at the edge of the pond. Looking out at this intimate vista, one could see the reeds and a stone lantern and the brightest of the evening's stars floating on the gloaming mirror of the pond. Then the breeze came again to crack the water's surface, and the picture was flooded.

It is one thing to recognise certain potentially useful affinities, and another to act on them.