Syntactical Passages
Mimic
On
the morning the last Lisbon daughter
took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this
time, and sleeping pills, like Terese—the
two paramedics arrived at the house
knowing exactly where the knife drawer
was, and the gas oven, and the beam in
the basement from which it was possible
to tie a rope. Jeffrey Eugenides
Mimic
 Anyway,
this man who’d first enjoyed her
favors, the officer-to-be, he’d been her
childhood sweetheart. So okay. I’m saying
that at the end of the summer she let the
blind man run his hands over her face, said
goodbye to him, married her childhood etc,
who was now a commissioned officer, and she
moved away from Seattle. But they’d kept in
touch, she and the blind man. Raymond
Carver
Mimic
 Science
shows that when you struggle to
solve a problem or make a new argument,
you’ve actually forming new connections in
your brain. So when you’re thinking hard,
you’re getting smarter. Which means this
year, challenge yourself to reach higher. And
set your sights on college in the years ahead.
Your country is counting on you. Obama
Mimic
And
then she began to dance, a slow
sensuous movement; the smoke of a
hundred cigars clinging to her like the
thinnest of veils. She seemed like a fair
bird-girl girdled in veils calling to me
from the angry surface of some gray and
threatening sea. I was transported. Ralph
Ellison
Mimic
 Sometimes
I rambled to pine groves, standing like
temples, or like fleets at sea, full-rigged, with
wavy boughs, and rippling with light, so soft and
green and shady that the Druids would have
forsaken their oaks to worship in them; or to the
cedar wood beyond Fint’s Pond, where the trees,
covered with hoary blue berries, spring higher
and higher, are fit to stand before Valhalla, and
the creeping juniper covers the ground with
wreaths full of fruit;… Henry David Thoreau
Mimic
Going
home at night, Charles went over
her words one by one, trying to recall
them, to fill out their sense, that he
might piece out the life she had lived
before he knew her. But he never saw
her in his thoughts other than he had
seen her the first time, or as he had just
left her. Gustave Flaubert
Mimic
 Nor
do they give you enough napkins, considering
how messy lobster is to eat, especially when
you’re squeezed onto benches alongside children
of various ages and vastly different levels of finemotor development—not to mention the people
who’ve somehow smuggled in their own beer in
enormous aisle-blocking coolers, or who all of a
sudden produce their own plastic tablecloths and
try to spread them over large portions of tables
to try to reserve them (the tables) for their little
groups. --David Foster Wallace.
Mimic

Meanwhile, the young man had slung on to his person a
decidedly shabby upper garment, and, erecting himself
before the blaze, looked down on e from the corner of his
eyes, for all the world as if there were some mortal feud
unavenged between us. I began to doubt whether he were a
servant or not, his dress and speech were both rude,
entirely devoid of the superiority observable in Mr. and Mrs.
Healthcliff; his thick brown curls were rough and
uncultivated, his whiskers encroached bearishly over his
checks, and his hands were embrowned like those of a
common labourer, still his bearing was free, almost haughty,
and he showed none of a domestic’s assiduity in attending
on the lady of the house. Emily Bronte
Mimic
 But
Ezinma’s iyi-uwa had looked real enough. It
was a smooth pebble wrapped in a dirty rag. The
man who dug it up was the same Okagubue who
was famous in all the clan for his knowledge in
these matters. Ezinma had not wanted to
cooperate with him at first. But that was only to
be expected. No ogbanje would yield would yield
her secrets easily, and most of them never did
because they died too young—before they could
be asked questions. Chinua Achebe
Mimic
 Like
all men in Babylon, I have been proconsul;
like all, a slave. I have also known omnipotence,
opprobrium, imprisonment. Look: the index
finder on my right hand is missing. Look: through
the rip in my cape you can see a vermilion tattoo
on my stomach. It is the second symbol, Beth.
This letter, on nights when the moon is full, gives
me power over men who mark is Gimmel, but it
subordinates me to the men of Aleph, who on
moonless nights owe obedience to those marked
with Gimmel. Jorge Louis Borges
Mimic
It
was seven minutes after midnight. The
dog was lying on the grass in the middle
of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears’s
house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as
if it were running on its side, the way
dogs run when they think they are
chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog
was not running or asleep. The dog was
dead. Mark Haddon
Mimic
I
was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on
a remarkably smogless Detroit day of
January 1960; and then again, as a
teenage boy, in an emergency room near
Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974…My
birth certificate lists my name as
Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most
recent driver’s license records my name
simply as Cal. Jeffrey Eugenides
Mimic
Our
hero was not one of those
Dominican cats everybody’s always
talking about—he wasn’t no home-run
hitter or fly bachatero, not a playboy
with a million hots on his jock.” Junot
Diaz
Mimic
It
was the Dover road that lay, on a
Friday night late in November, before
the first of the persons with whom
this history has business. The Dover
road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover
mail, as it lumbered up Shooter’s Hill.
Charles Dickens
Mimic
Acting
upon the loftiest of impulses,
filled with love for those who suffer,
urged toward fellowship with the
rebellious, committed to sacrifice, why
was it that there existed among
Communists so much hate, suspicion,
bitterness, and internecine strife? I stood
in the midst of people I loved and I was
afraid of them. Richard Wright
Mimic
She
is plucking her bird of paradise of its
dead branches, leaning around the plant
every time she hears a car. The woman
will never find the old house behind the
hedge of towering hibiscus at the bend of
the dirt road. Not a gringa dominicana in
a rented car with a road map asking for
street names! Dede had taken the call
over at the little museum this morning.
Julia Alvarez
Mimic
 In
1971 there was little to distinguish us two—one
the son of a pulmonary specialist, the other the
son of a notorious class enemy who had enjoyed
the priveledge of touching Mao’s teeth—from the
other hundred-odd “young intellectuals” who
were banished to the mountain known as the
Pheonix of the Sky. The name was a poetic way of
suggesting its terrifying altitude; the poor
sparrows and common birds of the plain could
never sour to its peak, for that was the reserve of
winged creatures allied to the sky: mighty,
mythical and profoundly solitary. Dai Sijie
Mimic
Together
they waged a perfunctory
battle against the outrageous behavior of
that place; against turned-over slop jars,
smacks on the behind, and gusts of sour
air. For they understood the source of
the outrage as well as they knew the
source of light. Toni Morrison
Mimic
It
began the usual way, in the bathroom
of the Lassimo Hotel. Sasha was
adjusting her yellow eye shadow in the
mirror when she noticed a bag on the
floor beside the sink that must have
belonged to the woman whose peeing
she could faintly hear through the vaultlike door of a toilet stall. Jennifer Egan
Mimic
The
idea of eternal return is a
mysterious one, and Nietzche has often
perplexed other philosophers with it: to
think that everything recurs as we once
experienced it, and that the recurrence
itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this
mad myth signify? Milan Kundera
Mimic
Mr.
President, it is natural for man to
indulge in the illusions of hope. We are
apt to shut our eyes against a painful
truth—and listen to the song of the siren
till she transforms us into beasts. Is this
the part of wise men engaged in a great
and arduous struggle for liberty?
Patrick Henry
Mimic
She
would sigh and look up under her
spun-glass eyebrows at Papa and then
turn to where we were huddled on the
floor in a heap and say softly, “I had
always dreamed of flying.” Katherine
Dunn
Mimic
 At
last he managed to get rid of him, and
rushed straight to the hotel. Emma was no
longer there. She had just gone in a fit of
anger. She detested him now. This failing to
keep their rendezvous seemed to her an
insult, and she tried to take up other reasons
to separate herself from him. He was
incapable of heroism, weak, banal, more
spiritless than a woman, avaricious too, and
cowardly. Flaubert
Mimic
 To
Mrs. Saville, England
 You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has
accompanied the commencement of an
enterprise which you have regarded with such
evil forebodings. I arrived here yesterday, and
my fist task is to assure my dear sister of my
welfare and increasing confidence in the
success of my undertaking.
 Mary Shelley
Mimic
The
backfiring is still fairly heavy on the
way down from the summit with the
engine dragging in second gear but then
the noise diminishes as we reach lower
altitudes. The forests return. We moved
among rocks and lakes and trees now,
taking beautiful turns and curves of the
road. Robert Pirsig
Mimic
During
the whole of a dull, dark, and
soundless day in the autumn of the year,
when the clouds hung oppressively low in
the heavens, I had been passing alone,
on horseback, through a singularly dreary
tract of country; and at length found
myself, as the shades of the evening
drew on, within view of the melancholy
House of Usher. Poe
Mimic
 Every
summer Lin Kong returned to Goose
Village to divorce his wife, Shuyu. Together
they had appeared at the courthouse in Wujia
Town many times, but she had always
changed her mind at the last moment when
the judge asked if she would accept a
divorce. Year after year, they went to Wujia
Town and came back with the same marriage
license issued to them by the country’s
registry office twenty years before. Ha Jin
Mimic
I
became what I am today at the age of
twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter
of 1975. I remember the precise moment,
crouching behind a crumbling mud wall,
peeking into the alley near the frozen creek.
That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what
they say about the past, I’ve learned, about
how you can bury it. Because the past claws
its way out. Khaled Hosseini
Mimic
 He
had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the
gloomiest trees of forest, which barely stood
aside to let the narrow path creep through, and
closed immediately behind. It was all as lonely as
could be and there is this peculiarity in such a
solitude, that the traveler knows not who may be
concealed by the innumerable trunks and the
thick boughs overhead; so that with lonely
footsteps he may yet be passing through an
unseen multitude. Hawthorne
Mimic
 He
watched her pour into the measure and
then into the jug rich white milk, not hers.
Old shrunken paps. She poured again a
measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she had
entered from a morning world, maybe a
messenger. She praised the goodness of the
mil, pouring it out. Crouching by a patient
cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on
her toadstool, her wrinkled finger quick at
the squirting dugs. James Joyce.
Mimic
There
is a lovely road that runs from
Ixopo into the hills. These hills are grasscovered and rolling, and they are lovely
beyond any singing of it. The road climbs
seven miles into them, to Carisbrooke;
and from there, if there is no mist, you
look down on one of the fairest valleys of
Africa. Alan Paton
Mimic
I
am doomed to remember a boy with a
wrecked voice—not because of his voice,
or because he was the smallest person I
ever knew, or even because he was the
instrument of my mother’s death, but
because he is the reason I believe in
God. I am a Christian because of Owen
Meany. John Irving
Mimic
 but
to go the racetrack helps you realize
yourself and the mob too. there’s a lot of
murky downgrading of Hemingway now by
critics who can’t write, and old ratbeard
wrote some bad things from the middle to
the end, but his head was becoming
unscrewed, and even then he made others
look like schoolboys raising their hands for
permission to make a little literary peepee.
Charles Bukowski
Mimic
 It
was Celia’s private luxury to indulge in this dislike.
She dared not confess it to her sister in any direct
statement, for that would be laying herself open to a
demonstration that she was somehow or other at war
with all goodness. But on safe opportunities, she had
an indirect mode of making her negative wisdom tell
upon Dorthea, and calling her down from her
rhapsodic mood by reminding her that people were
staring, not listening. Celia was not impulsive: what
she had to say could wait, and came from her always
with the same quiet staccato evenness. George Eliot
Mimic
 Such
a synosure, at least in aspect, and
something such too in nature, though with
important variations made apparent as the
story proceeds, was welkin-eyed Billy Budd—
or Baby Budd, as more familiarly, under
circumstances hereafter to be given, he at
last came to be called—aged twenty-one, a
foretopman of the British fleet toward the
close of the last decade of the eighteenth
century. Herman Melville
Mimic
 In
this by-place of nature there abode, in a
remote period of American history, that is to say,
some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the
name of Ichabod Crane, who sojourned, or, as he
expressed it, “tarried,” in Sleepy Hollow, for the
purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity.
He was a native of Connecticut, a State which
supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as
well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its
legions of frontier woodmen and country
schoolmasters. Washington Irving
Mimic
Ships
at a distance have every man’s
wish on board. For some they come in
with the tide. For others they sail
forever on the horizon, never out of
sight, never landing until the Watcher
turns his eyes away in resignation, his
dreams mocked to death by Time. That is
the life of men. Zora Neale Hurston
Mimic
If
you really want to hear about it, the
first thing you’ll probably want to know
is where I was born, and what my lousy
childhood was like, and how my parents
were occupied and all before they had
me, and all that David Copperfield kind
of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it,
if you want to know the truth. JD
Salinger
Mimic
 Two
days after we’d both agreed that the AtHome Marriage Repair kit couldn’t possibly
work for us, my wife and I went back to those
100 questions. Alexis had cried in her sleep
the night before, and I’d had another didactic
screaming episode in the deli section of the
Winn-Dixie I hadn’t seen coming on—and
didn’t remember happening by the time our
groceries were packed inside the trunk of the
car. George Singleton
Mimic
 Preparation:
Take care to chop the onion fine. To
keep from crying when you chop it (which is so
annoying!), I suggest you place a little bit on your
head. The trouble with crying over an onion is
that once the chopping gets your started and the
tears begin to well up, the net thing you know
you just can’t stop. I don’t know whether that’s
ever happened to you, but I have to confess it’s
happened to me, many times. Mama used to say
it was because I was especially sensitive to
onions, like my great-aunt, Tita. Laura Esquivel
Mimic
 When
the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked
Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula
Iguaran’s great-great-grandmother became so
frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the
firing of cannons that she lost control of her
nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The
burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest
of her days. She could only sit on one side,
cushioned by pillows, and something strange must
have happened to her way of waking, for she
never walked again in public. Gabriel Garcia
Marquez
Mimic
 Through
the fence, between the curling
flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They
were coming toward where the flag was and I
went along the fence. Luster was hunting in
the grass by the flower tree. They took the
flag out, and they were hitting. Then they
put the flag back and they went to the table,
and he hit and the other hit. Then they went
on, and I went along the fence. William
Faulkner
Mimic
Maman
died today. Or yesterday
maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram
from the home: “Mother deceased.
Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.”
That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it
was yesterday. Camus