Syntactical Passages

Mimic

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Terese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. Jeffrey Eugenides

Mimic

Anyway, this man who’d first enjoyed her favors, the officer-to-be, he’d been her childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying that at the end of the summer she let the blind man run his hands over her face, said goodbye to him, married her childhood etc, who was now a commissioned officer, and she moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in touch, she and the blind man. Raymond Carver

Mimic

Science shows that when you struggle to solve a problem or make a new argument, you’ve actually forming new connections in your brain. So when you’re thinking hard, you’re getting smarter. Which means this year, challenge yourself to reach higher. And set your sights on college in the years ahead. Your country is counting on you. Obama

Mimic

And then she began to dance, a slow sensuous movement; the smoke of a hundred cigars clinging to her like the thinnest of veils. She seemed like a fair bird-girl girdled in veils calling to me from the angry surface of some gray and threatening sea. I was transported. Ralph Ellison

MimicSometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing

like temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and green and shady that the Druids would have forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the cedar wood beyond Fint’s Pond, where the trees, covered with hoary blue berries, spring higher and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and the creeping juniper covers the ground with wreaths full of fruit;… Henry David Thoreau

Mimic

Going home at night, Charles went over her words one by one, trying to recall them, to fill out their sense, that he might piece out the life she had lived before he knew her. But he never saw her in his thoughts other than he had seen her the first time, or as he had just left her. Gustave Flaubert

MimicNor do they give you enough napkins, considering

how messy lobster is to eat, especially when you’re squeezed onto benches alongside children of various ages and vastly different levels of fine-motor development—not to mention the people who’ve somehow smuggled in their own beer in enormous aisle-blocking coolers, or who all of a sudden produce their own plastic tablecloths and try to spread them over large portions of tables to try to reserve them (the tables) for their little groups. --David Foster Wallace.

Mimic Meanwhile, the young man had slung on to his person a

decidedly shabby upper garment, and, erecting himself before the blaze, looked down on e from the corner of his eyes, for all the world as if there were some mortal feud unavenged between us. I began to doubt whether he were a servant or not, his dress and speech were both rude, entirely devoid of the superiority observable in Mr. and Mrs. Healthcliff; his thick brown curls were rough and uncultivated, his whiskers encroached bearishly over his checks, and his hands were embrowned like those of a common labourer, still his bearing was free, almost haughty, and he showed none of a domestic’s assiduity in attending on the lady of the house. Emily Bronte

MimicBut Ezinma’s iyi-uwa had looked real enough. It

was a smooth pebble wrapped in a dirty rag. The man who dug it up was the same Okagubue who was famous in all the clan for his knowledge in these matters. Ezinma had not wanted to cooperate with him at first. But that was only to be expected. No ogbanje would yield would yield her secrets easily, and most of them never did because they died too young—before they could be asked questions. Chinua Achebe

MimicLike all men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like

all, a slave. I have also known omnipotence, opprobrium, imprisonment. Look: the index finder on my right hand is missing. Look: through the rip in my cape you can see a vermilion tattoo on my stomach. It is the second symbol, Beth. This letter, on nights when the moon is full, gives me power over men who mark is Gimmel, but it subordinates me to the men of Aleph, who on moonless nights owe obedience to those marked with Gimmel. Jorge Louis Borges

Mimic

It was seven minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it were running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. Mark Haddon

Mimic

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974…My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver’s license records my name simply as Cal. Jeffrey Eugenides

Mimic

Our hero was not one of those Dominican cats everybody’s always talking about—he wasn’t no home-run hitter or fly bachatero, not a playboy with a million hots on his jock.” Junot Diaz

Mimic

It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November, before the first of the persons with whom this history has business. The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill. Charles Dickens

Mimic

Acting upon the loftiest of impulses, filled with love for those who suffer, urged toward fellowship with the rebellious, committed to sacrifice, why was it that there existed among Communists so much hate, suspicion, bitterness, and internecine strife? I stood in the midst of people I loved and I was afraid of them. Richard Wright

Mimic

She is plucking her bird of paradise of its dead branches, leaning around the plant every time she hears a car. The woman will never find the old house behind the hedge of towering hibiscus at the bend of the dirt road. Not a gringa dominicana in a rented car with a road map asking for street names! Dede had taken the call over at the little museum this morning. Julia Alvarez

MimicIn 1971 there was little to distinguish us two—one

the son of a pulmonary specialist, the other the son of a notorious class enemy who had enjoyed the priveledge of touching Mao’s teeth—from the other hundred-odd “young intellectuals” who were banished to the mountain known as the Pheonix of the Sky. The name was a poetic way of suggesting its terrifying altitude; the poor sparrows and common birds of the plain could never sour to its peak, for that was the reserve of winged creatures allied to the sky: mighty, mythical and profoundly solitary. Dai Sijie

Mimic

Together they waged a perfunctory battle against the outrageous behavior of that place; against turned-over slop jars, smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour air. For they understood the source of the outrage as well as they knew the source of light. Toni Morrison

Mimic

It began the usual way, in the bathroom of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the mirror when she noticed a bag on the floor beside the sink that must have belonged to the woman whose peeing she could faintly hear through the vault-like door of a toilet stall. Jennifer Egan

Mimic

The idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify? Milan Kundera

Mimic

Mr. President, it is natural for man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth—and listen to the song of the siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty?

Patrick Henry

Mimic

She would sigh and look up under her spun-glass eyebrows at Papa and then turn to where we were huddled on the floor in a heap and say softly, “I had always dreamed of flying.” Katherine Dunn

Mimic

At last he managed to get rid of him, and rushed straight to the hotel. Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an insult, and she tried to take up other reasons to separate herself from him. He was incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more spiritless than a woman, avaricious too, and cowardly. Flaubert

Mimic

To Mrs. Saville, EnglandYou will rejoice to hear that no disaster has

accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and my fist task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.

Mary Shelley

Mimic

The backfiring is still fairly heavy on the way down from the summit with the engine dragging in second gear but then the noise diminishes as we reach lower altitudes. The forests return. We moved among rocks and lakes and trees now, taking beautiful turns and curves of the road. Robert Pirsig

Mimic

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. Poe

MimicEvery summer Lin Kong returned to Goose

Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Together they had appeared at the courthouse in Wujia Town many times, but she had always changed her mind at the last moment when the judge asked if she would accept a divorce. Year after year, they went to Wujia Town and came back with the same marriage license issued to them by the country’s registry office twenty years before. Ha Jin

Mimic

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Khaled Hosseini

MimicHe had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the

gloomiest trees of forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as could be and there is this peculiarity in such a solitude, that the traveler knows not who may be concealed by the innumerable trunks and the thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely footsteps he may yet be passing through an unseen multitude. Hawthorne

Mimic

He watched her pour into the measure and then into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the mil, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled finger quick at the squirting dugs. James Joyce.

Mimic

There is a lovely road that runs from Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it. The road climbs seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke; and from there, if there is no mist, you look down on one of the fairest valleys of Africa. Alan Paton

Mimic

I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God. I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. John Irving

Mimic

but to go the racetrack helps you realize yourself and the mob too. there’s a lot of murky downgrading of Hemingway now by critics who can’t write, and old ratbeard wrote some bad things from the middle to the end, but his head was becoming unscrewed, and even then he made others look like schoolboys raising their hands for permission to make a little literary peepee. Charles Bukowski

Mimic It was Celia’s private luxury to indulge in this dislike.

She dared not confess it to her sister in any direct statement, for that would be laying herself open to a demonstration that she was somehow or other at war with all goodness. But on safe opportunities, she had an indirect mode of making her negative wisdom tell upon Dorthea, and calling her down from her rhapsodic mood by reminding her that people were staring, not listening. Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could wait, and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness. George Eliot

Mimic

Such a synosure, at least in aspect, and something such too in nature, though with important variations made apparent as the story proceeds, was welkin-eyed Billy Budd—or Baby Budd, as more familiarly, under circumstances hereafter to be given, he at last came to be called—aged twenty-one, a foretopman of the British fleet toward the close of the last decade of the eighteenth century. Herman Melville

MimicIn this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote

period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried,” in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity. He was a native of Connecticut, a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodmen and country schoolmasters. Washington Irving

Mimic

Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Zora Neale Hurston

Mimic

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. JD Salinger

Mimic

Two days after we’d both agreed that the At-Home Marriage Repair kit couldn’t possibly work for us, my wife and I went back to those 100 questions. Alexis had cried in her sleep the night before, and I’d had another didactic screaming episode in the deli section of the Winn-Dixie I hadn’t seen coming on—and didn’t remember happening by the time our groceries were packed inside the trunk of the car. George Singleton

MimicPreparation: Take care to chop the onion fine. To

keep from crying when you chop it (which is so annoying!), I suggest you place a little bit on your head. The trouble with crying over an onion is that once the chopping gets your started and the tears begin to well up, the net thing you know you just can’t stop. I don’t know whether that’s ever happened to you, but I have to confess it’s happened to me, many times. Mama used to say it was because I was especially sensitive to onions, like my great-aunt, Tita. Laura Esquivel

MimicWhen the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked

Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula Iguaran’s great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of waking, for she never walked again in public. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Mimic

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. William Faulkner

Mimic

Maman died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: “Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.” That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday. Camus