She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness.
Interpretation
The quote illustrates the beauty and sensory experience of being surrounded by books and literature.
In this evocative imagery, Joe Hill captures the profound sensory relationship one can have with literature, where the smell of books transcends mere pages and ink, resembling the delightful aroma of a sweet dessert. This metaphor reflects the joy and richness that literature brings to life, making it not just a source of knowledge but a pleasurable and enriching experience.
In practice
In a book club meeting, to express the joy of reading.
The mad sometimes drilled holes in their own heads to let the demons out. To relieve the pressure of thoughts they could no longer bear. Jude understood the impulse. Each beat of his heart was a fresh and staggering blow felt in the nerves behind his eyes and in his temples. Punishing evidence of life.
I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters.
It was something... the way a person's life picked up speed, the way a life was like a bullet aimed at one final target, impossible to slow or turn aside, and like the bullet, you were ignorant of what you were going to hit, would never know anything except the rush and the impact.
I thought Star Wars was too wacky for the general public.
Perfumes are the feelings of flowers.
Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.
No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.
The Heavenly Spheres make music for us,_x000D_ The Holy Twelve dance with us,_x000D_ All things join in the dance!_x000D_ Ye who dance not, know not what we are knowing.
And let me touch those curving claws of yellow ivory; and grasp the tail that like a monstrous asp coils round your heavy velvet paws.
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