Author: <span>D. A. Hosek</span>

I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem more real. Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier.

A couple weeks ago at mass, there was a song new to me, “Take from my Heart,” by Karen Schneider Kirner and John T. Kyler. The credits indicate that the lyrics are adapted from the “Act of Resignation” by Catherine McAuley. It managed to be the perfect blend of lyric and melody to really touch […]

All the things she read in Raymond Chandler’s books about being hit, he’d never mentioned how heavy it felt. Pete Dexter, Paris Trout. 

His face hitherto had, in the wonderful English fashion, expressed nothing whatever. Nothing. There was in it neither joy nor despair; neither hope nor fear; neither boredom nor satisfaction. He seemed to perceive no soul in that crowded room; he might have been walking in a jungle. I never came across such a perfect expression […]

I see no possible reasons for it. Is it so Mariette Baptiste will be praised and esteemed by the pious? Or is it so she shall be humiliated and jeered at by skeptics? Is it to honor religion or to humble science? And what are these horrible wounds, really? A trick of anatomy, a bleeding […]

That spring Jenny’s mother was expecting a baby, there was no rain worth remembering, the grass, the sun and the birds lost their self-centred winter mood and began to think of others. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Cold and calm under mackerel skies that pink in the sunset. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy.

Language refers only to itself, it is not the key to anything higher. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Blue Flower.

When Jesus washed Saint Peter’s feet it was surely a lesson in humility for his apostle, not for himself. We do not like to be done for. Ron Hansen, Mariette in Ecstasy.