The dress was both decorous and daring. No woman could criticize, no man fail to notice.

— Vera Caspary

Her face had the prettiness that the first glance almost exhausts, the prettiness, amazing in its quantity, that one sees for a moment under the light of the street lamps when shops and offices close for the day. She was short-nosed, pulpy-mouthed and faunish-eyed, and only the rather remarkable smallness of the head on the splendid thick throat saved her from ordinariness.

— Oliver Onions

For, paradoxically, awareness of the sensual and of the eternal are indivisibly linked.

 — Arthur Versluis

I have wrung life dry for your lips to drink,

Broken it up for your daily bread.

— Algernon Swinburne

Rick continued weeping as he stuttered and stammered, trying to define the concepts of his and Mary Sue’s relationship. Mary Sue was speechless. It wasn’t the kind of conversation she was normally accustomed to having with Christian pastors.

— Dale Hudson

The prophetic Poe, collaborating with his zeitgeist, arrived at the distinctive signs and symbols of a universal nightmare – and devised in the form of the detective story a means of keeping the nightmare at bay.

— David Lehman

I remember thinking that the head of my department at Kennett Teachers must be right when he maintains that he can understand an intelligent person doing research to blot out reality as one plays Chinese checkers or reads mystery stories, but he can’t understand why such a person thinks he is really doing something that counts.

— Carey Magoon