She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brow… - Theodore Sturgeon

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She was perhaps seventeen when it happened. She was in Central Park, in New York. It was too warm for such an early spring day, and the hammered brown slopes had a dusting of green of precisely the consistency of that morning's hoarfrost on the rocks. But the frost was gone and the grass was brave and tempted some hundreds of pairs of feet from the asphalt and concrete to tread on it.

Hers were among them. The sprouting soil was a surprise to her feet, as the air was to her lungs. Her feet ceased to be shoes as she walked, her body was consciously more than clothes. It was the only kind of day which in itself can make a city-bred person raise his eyes. She did.

For a moment she felt separated from the life she lived, in which there was no fragrance, no silence, in which nothing ever quite fit nor was quite filled. In that moment the ordered disapproval of the buildings around the pallid park could not reach her; for two, three clean breaths it no longer mattered that the whole wide world really belongs to images projected on a screen; to gently groomed goddesses in these steel-and-glass towers; that it belonged, in short, always, always to someone else.

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About Theodore Sturgeon

Theodore Sturgeon (born Edward Hamilton Waldo, 26 February 1918 – 8 May 1985) was an American author of science fiction, essayist, and poet.

Biography information from Wikiquote

Also Known As

Birth Name: Edward Hamilton Waldo
Also Known As: Ted
Alternative Names: E. Waldo Hunter Ted Sturgeon
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Additional quotes by Theodore Sturgeon

"I went back every evening, after work, for nearly a year. I learned the meaning of the cud of a leaf and the glisten of wet pebbles, and the special significance of curves and angles. A great deal of the writing was unwritten. Plot three dots on a graph and join them; you now have a curve with certain characteristics. Extend that curve while maintaining the characteristics, and it has meaning, up where no dots were plotted.

In just this way I learned to extend the curve of a grass-blade and of a protruding root, of the bent edges of wetness on a drying headstone. I quit smoking so I could sharpen my sense of smell, because the scent of earth after a rain has a clarifying effect on graveyard reading, as if the page were made whiter and the ink darker. I began to listen to the wind, and to the voices of birds and small animals, insects and people; because to the educated ear, every sound is filtered through the story written on graves, and becomes a part of it.

("The Graveyard Reader")"

Miss Kuhli (Merrihew had heard it “Cooley” the day before, and had built quite a different picture) was Eurasian. Not since the perfection of ferro-concrete and its self-stressed freedom has architecture been able to match the construction of such eyelids and supraorbital arches as those with which Miss Kuhli had been born. Her hands seemed to be the cooperative work of a florist and a choreographer. Her body had not been designed, but inspired, and her hair was such that it could not be believed at a single glance.

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He had been released with alacrity from the office because of his propensity for small office politics. It was a game he still played, and completely aside from his boiled-looking red face and his slightly womanish walk, he was out of place in the field, for boot-licking and back-stabbing accomplish even less out on the field than they do in an office.

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