Take a lucky dip in this refreshing pool of posts, randomly selected like literary Russian roulette (but more fun and much safer). Or filter by category to take a deeper dive into specific themes.  Enjoy!
Parrot-bright shrillness
A lovely mix of visual and aural, with the shrillness of light and colour also evoking a parrot's cry.  We landed in the usual parrot-bright...
As softly as …
What a place, what a time, the two idyllic years Durrell spent in Rhodes after the war. His account is full of lyrical descriptions of scenes and...
Intimations of radiance
Listening time: 3 minutes.An intricate description of the effect an ancient temple can work on the spirit - a falling away of complication and...
Marrow-meltingly sweet
Wish you as many doses of such sweetness as you need. And what a stark contrast to another marrow-related triologism, from Jane Eyre. How sweet it...
Mineral metaphor
Saint-Exupery takes your breath away with the originality of his metaphors. That peace is greater than the sum of its parts is one thing, but to...
The past as precious
The opening lines of a less well known novel, Mary Webb's engaging Precious Bane. Â She opens her foreword with a defence of the mute and invisible...
Ink-blue water
As the logos on this website testify, I'm an ink-geek, and love inky similes. Here is another one, about the sky rather than the sea.  A small...
As fabulous as …
A marvelously original simile for 'fabulous', found in this slim, exquisitely written book by Saint-Exupery. Something resonant in that phrase, the...
Fine feline quotes
Adding another in our series of themed selections, we have purrduced a page of illustrated quotations celebrating cats. We will add more as they...
And I shall teach the boy
Listening time: under 4 minutes.The Countess of Gormenghast ponders her personal curriculum for her newborn son Titus, soon after despatching him to...
Hare-bell sea
A lyrical description of the Greek island of Thera, bursting with flowers and trees, and all sloping down to a soft lilac-tinged blue sea. But there...
Learning by heart
Listening time: 10 minutes. It's been playing on my mind, the fact that recently I haven't learned any new poems by heart. This led me to revisit a...
Appreciation is a better mode for the understanding of achievement than are all the analytical kinds of accounting for the emergence of exceptional individuals. Appreciation may judge, but always with gratitude, and frequently with awe and wonder. Â
By ‘appreciation’ I mean something more than ‘adequate esteem’. Need also enters into it, in the particular sense of turning to the genius of others in order to redress a lack in oneself, or finding in genius a stimulus to one’s own powers, whatever these may emerge as being.
Source: Harold Bloom, Genius (London: Fourth Estate, 2002), p. 5
Love writingredux.com? Â Enjoy our sister sites:
www.foolsareeverywhere.com  I   www.nuannaarpoq.com  I  www.spyderceleste.com  Â
© Beatrice Otto 2021 - design & content unless otherwise stated - all rights reserved
Â
Â