The service stairs were next to the main stairs, separated only by a wall, but what a difference there was between them: the narrow back stairs, dangerously unrailed, under the bleak gleam of a skylight, each step worn down to a steep hollow, turned tightly in a deep grey shaft; whereas the great main sweep, a miracle of cantilevers, dividing and joining again, was hung with the portraits of prince-bishops, and had ears of corn in its wrought-iron banisters that trembled to the tread. It was glory at last, an escalation of delight, from which small doors, flush with the panelling, moved by levers below the prince-bishops’ high-heeled and rosetted shoes, gave access, at every turn, to the back stairs, and their treacherous gloom. How quickly, without noticing, one ran from one to the other, after the proud White Rabbit, a well-known Old Harrovian porn star with a sphincter that winked as bells rang, crowds murmured and pigeons flopped about the dormer window while Nick woke and turned in his own little room again, in the comfortable anticlimax of home.

On his back, in the curtained light, the inveterate habits of home took hold of him without a word . . .

— Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

No themes are so human as those that reflect for us, out of the confusion of life, the close connexion of bliss and bale, of the things that help with the things that hurt, so dangling before us for ever that bright hard medal, of so strange an alloy, one face of which is somebody’s right and ease and the other somebody’s pain and wrong.

— Henry James, 1908 preface to What Maisie Knew

He fumbled across the pillow to stroke his wife’s shoulder.

“Ailie — you sleeping already?”

“That’s Tracy,” answered a voice at his back. “I’m over here.”

–Kirk Curnutt, Hint Fiction

When, on his deathbed, he last saw her, she had not aged by so much as a day.

— Peter Straub, Hint Fiction

When they opened the cadaver, they found a house. A couple argued inside. There was rhythm to their words, like the beating of a heart.

–Barry Napier, Hint Fiction

The knight rides forth in coal-black steel
into the teeming world.

Outside his armor everything is there: sunlight and valley,
friend and foe and feast,
May, maiden, forest and grail,
and God himself in a thousand forms
to be found along every road.

But inside the armor darkly enclosing him
crouches death. And the thought comes
and comes again:
When will the blade
pierce this iron sheath,
the undeserved and liberating blade
that will fetch me from my hiding place
where I’ve been so long compressed —

so that, at last, I may stretch my limbs
and hear my full voice.

— Rilke, Book of Images

Never, not for a single day, do we let
the space before us be so unbounded
that the blooming of one flower is forever.

— Rilke, From the Eighth Duino Elegy

In spite of Fate, the marvelous abundance
of being, like the brimming land
or like stone figures
built into gateways, bearing up balconies.

Or a bronze bell, lifting its voice
over and over against the dullness of our days.
Or that single column in Karnak, standing
long after the temple fell.

Today this extravagance flashes by
in the blur of our haste,
out of the wide yellow day into the vaulted night.

In that rush it dissolves, leaving nothing behind,
just as a plane overhead makes no mark on the sky.
Only our minds see the curve of its flight.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 22

The school bus picks us up first so we claim the back seats. Make the white kids sit up front.

— Gwendolyn Joyce Mintz, Hint Fiction

Vainglory and curiosity are the two scourges of our soul. The latter leads us to thrust our noses into everything, and the former forbids us to leave anything unresolved and undecided.

— Montaigne

It is dangerous and presumptuous, besides the absurd temerity that it implies, to disdain what we do not comprehend.

— Montaigne

Retail. Thirty-nine hours a week for eighteen years, she says, proud. Like she’s a survivor of rape and she knows it.

— Kelly Spitzer, Hint Fiction

She loved to steal spoons. She didn’t need them; she just enjoyed having a hundred tiny silver mirrors to see what no one else could.

— Ty Miller, Hint Fiction

The old cat blinked once, focused. Then was lost to her forever.

— Jack Ketchum, Hint Fiction

That morning he was weightless. At the station, he smelled ash. Later, reaching for dust-caked limbs, he floated away, squinting against the sky’s brilliance.

— Michael Kelly, Hint Fiction