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.
To end up with a canvas that is no less beautiful than the empty canvas is to begin with.
Simultaneous contrast is not just a curious optical phenomenon – it is the very heart of painting. Repeated experiments with adjacent colors will show that any ground subtracts its own hue from the colors which it carries and therefore influences.
I want paint to work as flesh.
Any time is the time to make a poem.
I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.
All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.
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