Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories

I was wearing my flounced Spanish cretonne dress and a flower in my hair, and I was all bronzed by the sun and feeling beautiful.

We both share the love of finery, perfume and luxury. She is so lazy, languid—purely a plant, really. I have never seen a woman more yielding. She says that she always expects to find the man who will arouse her. She has to live in a sexual atmosphere even when she feels nothing. It is her climate. Her favorite statement is, “At that time, I was sleeping around with everybody.”

The chanchiquito had a passion for running up the skirts of women and inserting his snout between their legs.

sumptuously dressed in full satin skirts, with lace collar and cuffs neatly starched and a veil over her face. She sat stiffly like some personage out of an old painting,

but an imposing, dignified flirtation, more like ancient gallantry

This story had frightened Laura—the idea of an animal burrowing his head between her legs. She was afraid even to insert her finger. But at the same time the story revealed to her that between a woman’s legs there was room for an animal’s long snout

She shifted slightly to study him. She could see the high cheekbone shaped in such a way that he seemed to be always laughing, and his eyes turned upwards at the corners with perpetual humor. His hair looked uncombed, and his gestures were easy as he smoked

Jan was an artist who laughed at hunger, at work, at slavery, at everything. He preferred to be a tramp rather than lose his freedom to sleep as late as he liked, to eat what he could find at the time he wanted it, to paint only when the passion for work took him

they perpetually eluded him, so he often wrapped them up in a cloud of formless swathing, like the feet and hands of a cripple, and left the drawing as it was, all body, a body without feet to run away on or hands to caress anyone with.