Heather

“Across the street, there were parties at other windows. The sky was fading behind the roof peaks and chimney tops, which stood out like cardboard cutout silhouettes, and I looked from them to the lit windows, and back again. A flock of birds, pigeons probably, wheeled across the sky, heading home before dark.”
― Jo Walton, Half a Crown

“New York may end up being no more than a scrim, a spectral film that is none other than our craving for romance—romance with life, with masonry, with memory, sometimes romance with nothing at all. This longing goes out to the city and from the city comes back to us. Call it narcissism. Or call it passion. It has its flare-ups, its cold nights, its sudden lurches, and its embraces. It is our life finally revealed to us in the most lifeless hard objects we'll ever cast eyes on: concrete, steel, stonework. Our need for intimacy and love is so powerful that we'll look for them and find them in asphalt and soot.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“Ice lies on water as far as the eye can see: scattered rhinestones, spiral arms of ice, ice walls and icebergs, and bits of ice that have splintered off larger pieces whose translucent edges are shaped like miniature whales.”
― Gretel Ehrlich, The Future of Ice: A Journey Into Cold

“There was that all-pervasive evening scent of cut grass and jasmine.”
― William Dalrymple, City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi