Ned Hayes's Blog, page 124

Thanks to our bookish smart friend Craig Doeden, I now have a...

Thanks to our bookish smart friend 
Awesome… happily, I get to share some of these with Matt Haugh. 

( I made one addition to the stack, Sinful Folk…. and yep, I owe you a copy, for sure )

"April comes to us with her showers sweet. I wake to the...

"April comes to us with her showers sweet. I wake to the cries of little birds before the light comes across the heath. They wait all night with open eyes. Now, with the rain at dawn, their voices make melody.

I turn back the rich brocaded cloth of gold on my bed and walk to my glazed casement window. I imagine my mother calling to me in the plaintive voice of the wood fowl, her words echoing across the years.

My heart is restless though I live in comfort, cosseted in the manor house of Ashcroft. I wrap myself in a Moorish robe of intri- cate design and gaze beyond my solitary window. Raindrops speckle the costly glass as darkness lifts from the horizon.” 

— from the novel SINFUL FOLK

PHOTO: Pinterest sur We Heart It. http://weheartit.com/entry/78972782/via/malak_adny

"We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we..."

““We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.””

- José Saramago, The Double (via bookshavepores)

I want this!One of the secret doors of the Stift Admont...

I want this!

One of the secret doors of the Stift Admont library, Austria.

from: olympialetan

“Fog lifts in the valley, rising as mist through the...

“Fog lifts in the valley, rising as mist through the bare-limbed trees. Far below lies the deeping combe with our village in the heart of it. My whole world for nearly a decade has been contained in that place—and now the village of Duns looks so small. I hold up my hand, form a circle with my fingers. The distant village, wreathed in mist, seems a child’s plaything that I can hold in my own hand.

A great fallen yew with nurslings jutting evergreen from its bro- ken body lies near our path. This is the very place at which I first saw the village ten years ago. The line of trees here on the ridge is unchanged, as if I came here only yesterday.

I waited in the quiet vale of Duns far too long.”  

— from the novel SINFUL FOLK

PHOTO: Glowing Snowfall | J.R. Robinson

“I can see her now. On the day we take the forest path to the...

“I can see her now. On the day we take the forest path to the deep stream beside the alder copse. There a plover calls in the deep woodsy stillness, and then a pair of martins dart across the over-grown path. Through the trees can be seen the thick and fast-moving line of flowing water, a steep bank beneath our feet and flowering at the edge of the water, the purple loosestrife and meadowsweet of spring.”

— from the newly best-selling novel SINFUL FOLK 

The Book Lover's Guide to Covertly Reading During a Super Bowl Party

The Book Lover's Guide to Covertly Reading During a Super Bowl Party

"Cold tears as salty as ocean spray wet my face. I remember the...

"Cold tears as salty as ocean spray wet my face.

I remember the day before she died, my mother took me out in our little fishing boat, out on the open water of the sea—the thrum and hiss of surf upon the shore behind us, the rhythm never ceasing. And she taught me something: strange and secret words in a foreign tongue, a lilting singsong cadence to it.”

— from the novel Sinful Folk

Photo

"We edge closer to the fire, heads cocked toward the whispering...

"We edge closer to the fire, heads cocked toward the whispering wind as it brushes the treetops. Night birds warble, and small creatures rustle in the snow."

— from the novel SINFUL FOLK