Experience: Curiosity

Alaska finished her cigarette and flicked it into the river. “Why do you smoke so damn fast?” I asked. She looked at me and smiled widely, and such a wide smile on her narrow face might have looked goofy were it not for the unimpeachably elegant green in her eyes. She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, “Y’all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.”

"His fate was mingled with the frenzies of Empire and the doom of peoples. And it was not in peace and rest, but ruin and horror, that he reached his end."

"O my dear--such a charming day! And then last night--well, you shall have it all in order--as well as I can recollect"

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die.

"At the time not a soul in sleeping Halcomb heard them--four shotgun blasts that, all told, ended six human lives. But afterward the townspeople, theretofore sufficiently unfearful of each other to seldom trouble to lock their doors, found fantasy recreating them over and again--those somber explosions that stimulated fires of mistrust in the glare of which many old neighbors viewed each other strangely, and as strangers."

a constant stream of world and character riddles: an island with conflicting histories; a cold-blooded schoolmistress warmed by a passionate heart; a cautious captain who's up for anything (Fletcher 93)