As I Lay Dying

It's a hard life on women, for a fact. Some women. I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more. Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went and taken that lace-trimmed gown she had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes. "You will all have to look out for your pa the best you can," she said, "I'm tired."

William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

The Spinning Heart

There's a red metal heart in the centre of the low front gate, skewered on a rotating hinge. It's flaking now; the red is nearly gone. It needs to be scraped and sanded and painted and oiled. It still spins in the wind, though. I can hear it creak, creak, creak as I walk away. A flaking, creaking, spinning heart.

Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart

Everything Satisfactory

"She told me she was twenty-six."

"She could have been," said Mimi. "I mean she could have been sixteen when I knew her. That would make me thirty. O.K. I'm thirty. But you know better if you stop to think."

John O'Hara, "Everything Satisfactory" from John O'Hara in Hollywood

How Many Miles To Babylon?

Out beyond the trees the moon was shining. It had suddenly turned cold and the earth whirled gently, but not unkindly. Cautiously we moved towards the group around the fiddler, until suddenly we seemed to be sucked into the dance. I was enveloped by the smell of sweat and smoke and drink. Sweating hands brushed my hands, faces whirled and turned, and I too, not knowing what I was doing, or minding, and the earth moved with us all. The whole earth was dancing.

Jennifer Johnston, How Many Miles to Babylon