Dusky Beauty Quotes

He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.

She was a Phantom of delight When first she gleam'd upon my sight; A lovely Apparition, sent To be a moment's ornament: Her eyes as stars of twilight fair; Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair; But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn; A dancing shape, an image gay, To haunt, to startle, and waylay.

In the evening, when everything is tired and quiet, I sit with Walt Whitman by the rose beds and listen to what that lonely and beautiful spirit has to tell me of night, sleep, death, and the stars. This dusky, silent hour is his; and this is the time when I can best hear the beatings of that most tender and generous heart.

Bringing up the rear, the place of greatest danger, comes Tiger Lily, proudly erect, a princess in her own right. She is the most beautiful of dusky Dianas and the belle of the Piccaninnies, coquettish, cold, and amorous by turns; there is not a brave who would not have the wayward thing to wife, but she staves off the altar with a hatchet.

There are men who love to gaze with the mind at things that can never be seen, feel at least the throb of a beauty that will never be known and hear over immense, bleak reaches the echo of that which is no celestial music but only their heart's vain cries.

i am queen of percha, sullenest of the seven seas, Behold my dusky desert beauty". She wiped of her scarf and did a terrible belly dance.

This afternoon I walked through the city, making for a café where I was to meet Raphael. It was about half-past two on a day that had never really got light. It began to snow. The low clouds made a grey ceiling for the city; the snow muffled the noise of the cars until it became almost rhythmical; a steady, shushing noise, like the sound of tides beating endlessly on marble walls. I closed my eyes. I felt calm. There was a park. I entered it and followed a path through an avenue of tall, ancient trees with wide, dusky, grassy spaces on either side of them. The pale snow sifted down through bare winter branches. The lights of the cars on the distant road sparkled through the trees: red, yellow, white. It was very quiet. Though it was not yet twilight the streetlights shed a faint light. People were walking up and down on the path. An old man passed me. He looked sad and tired. He had broken veins on his cheeks and a bristly white beard. As he screwed up his eyes against the falling snow, I realised I knew him. He is depicted on the northern wall of the forty-eighth western hall. He is shown as a king with a little model of a walled city in one hand while the other hand he raises in blessing. I wanted to seize hold of him and say to him: In another world you are a king, noble and good! I have seen it! But I hesitated a moment too long and he disappeared into the crowd. A woman passed me with two children. One of the children had a wooden recorder in his hands. I knew them too. They are depicted in the twenty-seventh southern hall: a statue of two children laughing, one of them holding a flute. I came out of the park. The city streets rose up around me. There was a hotel with a courtyard with metal tables and chairs for people to sit in more clement weather. Today they were snow-strewn and forlorn. A lattice of wire was strung across the courtyard. Paper lanterns were hanging from the wires, spheres of vivid orange that blew and trembled in the snow and the thin wind; the sea-grey clouds raced across the sky and the orange lanterns shivered against them. The Beauty of the House is immeasurable; its Kindness infinite.

THE CAT Come, superb cat, to my amorous heart; Hold back the talons of your paws, Let me gaze into your beautiful eyes Of metal and agate. When my fingers leisurely caress you, Your head and your elastic back, And when my hand tingles with the pleasure Of feeling your electric body, In spirit I see my woman. Her gaze Like your own, amiable beast, Profound and cold, cuts and cleaves like a dart, And, from her head down to her feet, A subtle air, a dangerous perfume Floats about her dusky body.

There were kind lies. You still look beautiful. I love you. I forgive you. There were frightened lies. Someone else must have taken it. Of course I am Anglican. I never saw that baby before. There were predatory lies. Buy this tonic if you want your child to recover. I will look after you. Your secret is safe with me. Half-lies, and the tense little silences where a truth should have been. Lies like knives, lies like poultices. The tiger's stripe, and the fawn's dusky dapple. And everywhere, everywhere, the lies that people told themselves. Dreams like cut flowers, with no nourishing root. Will-o'-the-wisp lights to make them feel less alone in the dark. Hollow resolutions and empty excuses.

He liked the way darker color flooded her cheeks, turning that beautiful brown skin a dusky rose.

She was about to laugh at the selfishness of her reaction, but she was distracted by the cool evening air when she stepped outside, the dusky blue of the sky, and the freshly paved street in front of her, its blackness bisected by a bright yellow line, a world so inexplicably beautiful that she forgot what she was thinking about and just stood still for a moment, breathing it all in.

The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!

The streak of sunshine journeying through the prisoner's cell; it may be considered as something sent from Heaven to keep the soul alive and glad within him. And there is something equivalent to this sunbeam in the darkest circumstances; as flowers, which figuratively grew in Paradise, in the dusky room of a poor maiden in a great city; the child, with its sunny smile, is a cherub. God does not let us live any where or any how on earth, without placing something of Heaven close at hand, by rightly using and considering which, the earthly darkness or trouble will vanish, and all be Heaven.

Beautiful she was by the morning light; with her fair, rich color, and her gleaming eyes, and her crown of halfbright, half-dusky hair, like the bronze in which there much mixture of gold. But I thought I never saw anything of so much greed, or so intensely selfish. There was a vivid animal pleasure in the sight of what were dainties to her senses ; but there was no sort of gratitude or feeling at the generous and thoughtful affection which had been thus tender of her in her absence. She ate all there was on the table; seeming to like to draw the pleasure out to its longest span; when ended, she washed the things and set them away, and did a little house-work, all in a very idle, slovenly manner—like one whose heart was not at all in her occupation.

...] and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind’s eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years. [...] There were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to Heaven.

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things— the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.

I leaned back against the hearth, and the fire's warmth and fluttering light lulled me into gentler thoughts of Francesca. I closed my eyes and saw the beloved face dominated by wide-set antelope eyes. Her eyebrows arched like the wings of a swan, and the whites of her eyes, almost bluish, made a startling contrast to her caramel skin. I later learned that her great-great-grandmother had been kidnapped by slavers in Turkey, brought to Venice, and then sold to a German trader. It was a common story in Venice. Francesca's more recent ancestors had been German and Italian, and the result was a mix of northern ice and Mediterranean warmth. Francesca's upper lip curved in that sensual way that caused jealous Muslim husbands to veil their wives' faces. Her smoldering Levantine beauty contrasted with her silver-blond Teutonic hair, shockingly fair next to her dusky complexion and the sultry hint of Byzantium flashing in her dark eyes. Her nostrils were shaped like perfect teardrops.

[Northerners] took over the Southern myth and themselves began to revel in it. This acceptance was to culminate in Gone With the Wind, the enormous success of which novel makes a curious counterbalance to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But it began in the Century of the eighties with the stories of Thomas Nelson Page. Though Page had been only twelve at the end of the Civil War, so had had little experience of the old regime, he really invented for the popular mind Old Massa and Mistis and Meh Lady, with their dusky-skinned adoring retainers. The Northerners, after the shedding of so much blood, illogically found it soothing to be told that slavery had not been so bad, that the Negroes were a lovable but simple race, whose business was to work for whites. And Page also struck in his stories a note of reconciliation that everybody wanted to hear: he cooked up romances between young Northern officers, as gentlemanly as any Southerner, and spirited plantation beauties who might turn out to be the young men's cousins and who in any case would marry them after the war.

He danced well, as if it were natural and joyous in him to dance... Gertrude herself was rather contemptuous of dancing: she had not the slightest inclination towards that accomplishment, and had never learned even a Roger de Coverley... Therefore the dusky, golden softness of this man's sensuous flame of life, that flowed from off his flesh like the flame from a candle, not baffled and gripped into incandescence by thought and spirit as her life was, seemed to her something wonderful, beyond her. He came and bowed above her. A warmth radiated through her as if she had drunk wine. "Now do come and have this one wi' me," he said, caressively. "It's easy, you know. I'm pining to see you dance." She had told him before she could not dance. She glanced at his humility, and smiled. Her smile was very beautiful. It moved the man so that he forgot everything. "No, I won't dance," she said softly. Her words came clean and ringing. Not knowing what he was doing - he often did the right thing, by instinct - he sat beside her, inclining reverentially. "But you mustn't miss your dance," she reproved. "Nay, I don't want to dance that - it's not one as I care about." "Yet you invited me to it." He laughed very heartily at this. "I never thought o' that. Tha'rt not long in taking the curl out of me." It was her turn to laugh quickly. "You don't look as if you'd come much uncurled," she said. "I'm a pig's tail, I curl because I canna help it," he laughed - rather boisterously.

Little by little, his eyes warmed into that dusky shade of brown she'd come to miss. A shadow traced the outline of his body, from the curve in his neck to the powerful slope of his shoulders. As his glimmering blue aura faded, his hair blackened, and his skin, bronzed from years of training under the sun, glowed with life. She had no idea what came over her- impulse or instinct- but she reached for Shang's hand. He looked surprised, and for an instant she wondered whether it was because he could feel her touch, or because she had reached for him. Maybe both. Shang's stance loosened, and he drew her close, not letting go of her hand. "I told you once you were the craziest man I'd ever met. I guess I have to change that to the craziest woman." Mulan laughed. "You're delaying us from leaving Diyu to tell me that?" "And that Ping was right about his sister." Now Mulan lifted her chin, curious. "Why is that?" "She's strong and kind and beautiful and brave...." "And also speaks her mind," Mulan reminded him. "... Honest, in the way that counts most." "And she occasionally disobeys orders," Mulan warned him, "even from her commanding officer." "... She has discerning judgment." Mulan smiled. Tentatively, she reached for a wisp of hair that clung to Shang's temple. She brushed it aside gently, and Shang caught her hand in his and brought it to his chest. Mulan's skin tingled. "I'll never meet another girl like her," he said. "Now that the war is over, I'd be a fool to let her out of my sight.

I still cherish my childhood memories of the sun opening the dusky eyelids of the west and the misty mornings against the backdrop of of Kgalatlou Mountain. The green prime of summer, twingling leaves of acacia yrees of Manthakge Plains, pure clear sky, the smooth plough fields and lush green meadows. In winter, that green carpet will be replaced by drearily looking land like a dim picture of the drowned past, all signs of life and feeling gone out of it, with the plough fields scorched and naked, the streams of Manyane silent, and the grass of the meadows looking like burned powder.  I still remember and cherish the touch of autumn nights and the ruddy moon leaning over Madibong. When I think about this, a sorrowful silent tear always roll down my cheek, I become sad and gripped by grief because of what has now become of the land of my forefathers. I have known and cherished its distinguished  rocks, fauna, and flora since I could stand and walk. I know its mountain slopes, plains, its rocks, and bushes like the veins and knuckles at the back of my hand. The ever changing beauty of Leolo Mountains, from the aloes of Segodi Boulders to the lilies of Legaletlweng; the imposing Letheleding Boulders towering over Manyane Dale. The interesting contrast of granite ingenious sedimentary rocks of Leolo Mountains and the red sand rock of Seolwane Mountain, the red sandy soil of Leruleng, the dark clay soil of Marakane and the red fertile loom soil of Sehalbeng Plains. The Magnetite rocks Ga - Sethadi and the shale rocks of Malatjane.

Carrying her over to his bed, he slowly laid her on it. She sank into the mattress with a dreamy murmur of a sigh. Though the protective impulse he had felt toward her earlier had returned full force, the soft and sensual moan from her lips filled him with a moment's blinding lust. Dear God. A tremor of hunger ran through him. His stare traveled over her lax face and down her white neck to her creamy chest. He swallowed hard, gazing at her breasts. Somehow, he became fixated on them again. Heart pounding, he moved slowly and with caution sat on the edge of the bed. Desire slammed through his veins, but he only meant to look. She was a harlot, she wouldn't care, as long as he had money, which he did, lots of it. Yet it amazed him that such beauty could be purchased for the taking. She was exquisite, with the dusky fringe of her lashes fanned above her cheeks in sleep. The thick and wavy cloud of her satiny brown hair flowed back from the pale oval of her face and spilled across his pillow. He marveled at the creamy shimmer of her complexion in the firelight, her flushed cheeks like delicate pink-tinted porcelain. His gaze traveled over her smooth forehead, the delicate twin arches of her light brown eyebrows, and her small, prettily formed nose. He would not have guessed her any common sort of wench. Then his attention strayed to her pink lips in ever-growing desire, a gathering smolder darkening his eyes. She had a very charming chin, slightly pronounced, and hinting at a firm stubbornness of character. He wanted to nibble its smooth rounded curve.

you want a romance with my blackness. and how it holds you. how it illuminates your skin. makes you break your breath. against itself. and how is this possible. when your world has never made you breath. not once. ever. but my blackness makes you think about yourself. in a way you have never. and you are open. a question. alive. and now hungry. my blackness is your first love. you are convinced it is. showing you what your eyes could ‘never’ see before. a ‘world’ bigger. brighter. dark. dusky and wild. unashamed of itself. rebellious. and it’s cosmic. your relationship with how the night rolls off me into your hands. you and my blackness are soul mates. you met so you could learn. more. expand. because you always knew you were not like the others. who made sure they ate one white thing every day. no. you were always uncomfortable with yourself. you wear my culture around your neck. bask in and praise its jewels. pick it up on days when you want attention. put it down when it starts to stain. (you don’t want to be disrespectful and take more than you should. you just want to be a part of something so beautiful.) my blackness came to save you. came to help you escape. the clutches of racism. of having that beast anywhere inside you. around you. next to you. your comfort. intimacy. proximity. with my blackness confirms. and affirms. your nonracism. your lack of hate. it is this heady trip. this painful awesome tryst. that brings you. flushed and moon eyed. to my door with thank yous. and i love yous. you have taught me to be a better person. you have changed my life. but this was never a relationship. i have no idea who you are. and i laugh incredulous and insulted. at the notion that my blackness could ever be your first love. that my blackness is your freedom. that my blackness is yours. — fetish

I can’t even see your face.” A strange chill still curled off of him like smoke and even though the glass garden was teeming with little lights, shades veiled him. “Is that what you want?” he said. “Would it make you trust me?” “It would be a start.” “You are impossible to please.” I said nothing. Amar leaned forward, and I felt the silken trails of his hood brush across my neck. My breath constricted. “Is that what you want? An unguarded gaze can spill a thousand secrets.” “I would know them anyway,” I said evenly. I waited for him to dissuade me, but when he remained silent, I reached out. Amar stood still, lean muscles tensed beneath his clothes. I could hear his breathing, see his chest rising and falling, smell that particular scent of mint and smoke that hung around him. Slowly, I untied the ends of the dove-gray hood. Small pearls snagged against the silk of his covering. Suddenly, his hands reached around my wrist. “I trust you,” he said. The hood fell to the ground, a mere rustle of silk against glass. I lifted my gaze, searching Amar’s face. He was young, and yet there was something worn about his features. I took in the stern line of his nose and the smooth expanse of tawny skin. His features possessed a lethal kind of elegance, like a predator at rest--bronzed jaw tapering to a knife’s point, lips curled in the faintest of grins and heavy brows casting dusky shadows over his eyes. When I looked at him, something stirred inside me. It felt like recognition sifted through dreams; like the moment before waking--when sleep blurred the true world, when beasts with sharp teeth and beautiful, winged things flew along the edges of your mind. Amar met my gaze and his eyes were raw. Burning. “Well?” he asked. There was no rebuke in his voice, only curiosity. “I see no secrets in your gaze,” I said. I see only night and smoke, dreams and glass, embers and wings. And I would not have you any other way.

Slowly, as though touching it might destroy the image, he reached up and put trembling fingers to her forehead . . . her cheek . . . her nose . . . her lips.  The image did not go away.  It did not waver.  And as he stared in wonder and a sort of frozen disbelief, he saw the shyness and joy in the face that stared back at him. A face that he was, after two long months, seeing for the very first time. He saw a square jaw and high, prominent cheekbones that lent her a look of gauntness and strength; dark, velvety-brown eyes fringed by long black lashes; a shy and smiling mouth; full, dusky lips; and glossy hair the color of strong coffee, tightly braided and pinned in a coronet around her head.  She was beautiful, even if not in the conventional sense, striking, slightly exotic, with flawlessly smooth skin of a slightly bronzed tone, not unlike that of a sailor who's spent his life in the sun. It was a lovely color. A warm, toasted, caramel-color that made him want to put his lips to it and kiss her all over. "Amy," he repeated, in a disbelieving whisper.  "I can see you."  He swallowed hard, and traced the shape of her mouth with his fingers.  "I can see you." And he could also see something else.  Mist in those huge, soft eyes — and a sort of awkwardness, if not fear, about his first visual impression of her. "And just what is it you see, Charles?" "I see a beautiful young woman — " he grinned — "garbed in the most singularly hideous gown imaginable." "Oh, Charles," she cried, impulsively flinging her arms around him.  He embraced her in turn.  They remained like that, holding each other, both of them laughing and rejoicing and rocking back and forth in the straw. "It was that damned horse!" he managed, setting her back to gaze into her rapt, mobile face.  "The blow must've done something, must've jarred something loose inside my head.  Don't you think?" "Either that, or your sight was just plain destined to return anyhow.  Maybe God simply decided that the time had come for you to have it back again." "So that I could see you!" "So you could write your own letters!" "So I could find my way without a cane!" Laughing with joy, he hugged her once more, then set her back, trailing his finger down her cheek, the edge of her jaw.  Gently, he tipped her chin up so that her luminous gaze held his.  "And look into the eyes of the woman who has become my dearest and very best friend." And look he did; then, before he even knew what he was about, he closed his eyes and kissed her. Unlike

There was one way he could help her though—she was still shivering from the cold. Without saying a word he unsnapped his shirt and shrugged it off, baring his upper body. “Hey, whoa—what are you doing?” Olivia was looking at him with wide eyes as though he was about to pounce on her. Did she really think so little of him to believe that he would try to take advantage of her when she was injured and helpless? Baird felt his heart fist in his chest. “Only this,” he said gruffly, draping the crimson shirt around her shivering bare shoulders. “Oh…uh, thanks.” She was staring at him now, as though she’d never seen a male before. Baird looked down at himself to see if there was something wrong. He had spent a full hour in the bathing pool that morning preparing but was it possible he had spilled something on himself before getting dressed to claim her? The broad planes of his muscular chest looked all right to him—his dusky tan skin was marked by the whitish scars left by the AllFather’s torture but a Kindred warrior always wore such marks with pride. There was a small patch of black hair between the two flat copper disks of his nipples and a trail of it led down his corded abdomen into the black uniform pants he was wearing. Truly there was nothing to stare at—so why was she still staring? “Is there a problem?” he asked at last. “You don’t like the way I look?” “Uh, no, I…You look fine. Just fine.” Olivia looked down at her hands, her fair skin blushing a deep embarrassed red. “What’s wrong then?” “Nothing.” But her beautiful silvery eyes were still flickering up to his bare chest and back down to her hands as though she couldn’t quite look away. Baird resisted the urge to tilt her chin up so she would have to meet his eyes directly. Why did she keep looking at him? He looked down at his chest again. Maybe she preferred smooth skin only? If so she was out of luck, only Tranq Kindred grew no body hair. “What’s wrong, Lilenta?” he asked her earnestly. “Is there somethin’ you want me to change?” “No, it’s nothing you can change. You’re just so…” She made a helpless little motion with one hand. “You’re just so big. And…and muscular.” Baird frowned. “Sorry about that—a warrior has to keep his body in top physical shape.” “No, don’t apologize.

The comical dusky down that had covered Anna’s head in early childhood had become a waist-length mantle, its rich darkness shot through like watered silk with chestnut, indigo, and bronze. “Over my dead body will you cut your hair.

Her skin was normally what he would call dusky, a beautiful shade of the softest browns of a faded oak leaf.

I write these last lines on Sauvie's Island - the Wappatto of the Indians - sitting upon the bank of the river, beneath the gnarled and ancient cottonwood that still marks the spot where the old Columbia trail led up from the water to the interior of the island. Stately and beautiful are the far snow-peaks and the sweeping forest. The woods are rich in the colors of an Oregon autumn. The white wappatto blooms along the marshes, its roots ungathered, the dusky hands that once reaped the harvest long crumbled into dust. Blue and majestic in the sunlight flows the Columbia, river of many names -- the Wauna and the Wemath of the Indians, the St. Roque of the Spaniards, the Oregon of poetry -- always vast and grand, always flowing placidly to the sea. Steamboats of the present; batteaux of the fur traders; ships, Grey's and Vancouver's, of discovery; Indian canoes of the old unknown time -- the stately river has seen them all come and go, and yet holds its way past forest and promontory, still beautiful and unchanging. Generation after generation, daring hunter, ardent discoverer, silent Indian -- all the shadowy peoples of the past have sailed its waters as we sail them, have lived perplexed and haunted by mystery as we live, have gone out into the Great Darkness with hearts full of wistful doubt and questioning, as we go; and still the river holds its course, bright, beautiful, inscrutable. It stays; we go. It there anything beyond the darkness into which generation follows generation and race follows race? Surely there is an after-life, where light and peace shall come to all who, however defeated, have tried to be true and loyal; where the burden shall be lifted and the heartache shall cease; where all the love and hope that slipped away from us here shall be given back to us again, and given back forever Via crucis, via lucis.

It’s as if her whole body is endued with a magnetic layer to keep the male gaze glued to her, isn’t it? If not, how can one explain her dusky complexion?

A beautiful woman, no matter how lovely her skin, would be considered indecent were she to show her bare buttocks or feet in the presence of others; and how very crude and tasteless to expose the toilet to such excessive illumination. The cleanliness of what can be seen only calls up the more clearly thoughts of what cannot be seen. In such places the distinction between the clean and the unclean is best left obscure, shrouded in a dusky haze.

Her dough, loaded with butter and sour cream, had risen beautifully. The fish, the dilled rice, the dusky wild mushrooms, the thin blinchinki for the filling layers, had all come out juicy and tasty. Only now, two hours before the party, right before constructing the pie, does Mom suddenly experience distress. “Anyut, tell me,” she says. “What’s the point of the blinchiki? Filling dough with more dough!” I blink blearily. Ah, the mysteries of the czarist stomach. “Maybe excess is the point?” I suggest meekly.

Those of the upper class began to look around for ways to get darker. It became the fashion for them to spend hours at the seashore basking naked in the sunshine and then to dash back, heavily bronzed, to their homes, and, preening themselves in their dusky skins, lord it over their paler, and thus less fortunate, associates. Beauty shops began to sell face powders named Poudre Nègre, Poudre le Egyptienne and L’Afrique.

It’s so simple but it’s sweet, and true, and maybe that’s what I’ve been missing. Maybe not a lot else matters when things are sweet and true like this, when we’re holding hands on a roof where we’re not really supposed to be, when the sunlight is a dusky gold, when everything feels beautiful and perfect even though I know it’s not. Even though I know there’s no perfect when it comes to people, only endless irregularities: gaps and holes and sharp edges and broken pieces, but it all works anyway. Sometimes in the strangest, most beautiful ways.

The oblong tower of the church, with its wrought-iron steeple, caught the last reflections of the sun against the hills. This is what a cinematographer would call the golden hour, the glowing time just after the sun sinks below the horizon and before the dark sets in. It's the watercolor skies--- discreet layers of cotton-candy pink, dusky rose, and periwinkle, when the fields are their deepest green, and the wheat has a halo that rises from the surface. We were standing on the medieval ramparts, the walls that once protected this small community from the hostilities of the outside world. Just below us was a field of lavender, the rows tidy and symmetrical. Just behind, a hedge of rosemary bushes. In the distance I could make out the summit of Reillanne, golden city on a hill.

WARRIORS (toms and she-cats without kits) WHITESTORM—big white tom APPRENTICE, BRIGHTPAW DARKSTRIPE—sleek black-and-gray tabby tom APPRENTICE, FERNPAW FROSTFUR—beautiful white coat and blue eyes BRINDLEFACE—pretty tabby LONGTAIL—pale tabby tom with dark black stripes APPRENTICE, SWIFTPAW MOUSEFUR—small dusky brown she-cat APPRENTICE, THORNPAW BRACKENFUR—golden brown tabby tom DUSTPELT—dark brown tabby tom APPRENTICE, ASHPAW SANDSTORM—pale ginger she-cat APPRENTICES (more than six moons old, in training to become warriors) SANDSTORM—pale ginger she-cat SWIFTPAW—black-and-white tom CLOUDPAW—long-haired white tom BRIGHTPAW—she-cat, white with ginger splotches THORNPAW—golden brown tabby tom FERNPAW—pale gray (with darker flecks) she-cat, pale green eyes ASHPAW—pale gray (with darker flecks) tom, dark blue eyes

The year was 1968, and Susan was sixteen years old. She’d come to Disneyland with her family, but as soon as they’d entered the gates, she waved goodbye to her mother, brother, and grandparents, saying she’d meet up with them later at the ice cream parlor on Main Street. She hurried down the street and across the bridge to the Sleeping Beauty Castle before her mother had a chance to protest. She knew she’d later be in trouble for running off but didn’t care; she wanted to be alone and away from her family for at least part of the day.

Through the window slit the blaze shone like a giant magic lantern, orange through dusky blue; it was beautiful in its doom.