John Fowles

The dark figure on the raised white terrace; legate of the sun facing the sun; the most ancient royal power.

Half by desipience, half by proclivity, he had come to live in a world where the only significant leisure activities were coupling and consuming.

A man was standing on top of the bluff, ashily silhouetted against the night sky.

The object of the meta-theatre is precisely that – to allow the participants to see through their first roles in it. But that is only the catastasis.

For him even the most painful social confrontations and contrasts, which would have stabbed the conscience of even the vulgarest nouveau riche, were stingless. Without significance except as vignettes, as interesting discords, as pleasurable because vivid examples of the algedonic polarity of existence.

His batrachian lips pursed into a smile, and he dug again into the honey.

I reached out and snicked a white thread that hung from her sleeve.

Once more I was a man in a myth, incapable of understanding it, but somehow aware that understanding it meant it must continue, however sinister its peripeteia.

In another minute there was no letter; but, as with every other relationship in my life, an eschar of ashes. The word is rare, but exact.

His mouth had been struck or kicked. The lips were severely contused, reddened.

’Twas thrown in a goyal of thick bushes, four hundred paces from the road. But he who found it saw a glint of the brass, amid the leaves.

Not all ladies in my profession are as that shameless hoyden, Mrs Charke, that has brought such distress through her malicious conduct and ill repute upon her worthy father, Mr Cibber; far from it, sir.