"Travels With Charley"

It's hard to predict which writers one would have particular affinities with. In some cases, the voice of an author would be so distinctive and affecting that after a while the cadence and the color of her language would seep into one's own thoughts.  Usually I can't resist taking on 亦舒's superior cynicism for a day or two after reading her books, but I didn't figure Steinbeck's robust lyricism would have this effect on me as well.

• the first tempering of darkness with the dawn
• The customers were folded over their coffee cups like ferns.
• The night was lovely beyond thought.
• I put on clean clothes and went out with him into the star-raddled night. And the Aurora Borealis was out. I've seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in an infinite theater.
• (Deer Isle:) I remember very clearly. It might have been caused by the season with a quality of light, or the autumn clarity. Everything stood out separate from everything else, a rock, a rounded lump of sea-polished driftwood on a beach, a roof line. Each pine tree was itself and separate even if it was a part of a forest.
• (Wisconsin:) There was a penetration of the light into solid substance so that I seemed to see into things, deep in, and I've seen that kind of light elsewhere only in Greece... The land dripped with richness, the fat cows and pigs gleaming against green, and, in the smaller holdings, corn standing in little tents as corn should, and pumpkins all about.
  
• The years crawled back in their holes. It was the Monterey where they used to put a wild bull and a grizzly bear in the ring together, a place of sweet and sentimental violence, and a wise innocence as yet unknown and therefore undirtied by undiapered minds.
• The world was remade and shining. There are as many worlds as there are kinds of days, and as an opal changes its colors and its fire to match the nature of a day, so do I.
  

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