walking in silence beside her elders who were no longer Cousin Eva and Father, since they had forgotten her presence, but had become Eva and Harry, w… - Katherine Anne Porter

I thought you said you’re a painter,” said Denny. “I am. Timekeeping in a mine was the way I made my living, so I could work,” said David. Denny thought this over a while, and then said: “Look, that’s something I can’t understand — you spend time working at something you can’t make a living at, and then you take a job so you can make enough money to go on working at the work you can’t live on — it gets me down,” he said. “And you call yourself a painter, but why aren’t you just as much a timekeeper in a mine? Why can’t you call yourself a timekeeper?” “Because I really am not one,” said David, “I just make my living that way, or did.… Now I’m going to try to make a living painting, but if I can’t, why, I can always get some kind of job, to keep me while I paint.

You can't write about people out of textbooks, and you can't use jargon. You have to speak clearly and simply and purely in a language that a six-year-old child can understand; and yet have the meanings and the overtones of language, and the implications, that appeal to the highest intelligence.

An unbalanced savagely individualist people,” said Father Garza, “with their weird untraceable language and their pagan Catholicism … what would one expect? His name was Etchegaray,” he pronounced, rolling the word with sensuous pleasure.