DESCRIPTIVE WRITING

1. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING Mr. Sutton’s Top 5 Passages

2. #5 Out of the gravel there are peonies growing. They come up through the loose grey pebbles, their buds testing the air like snails' eyes, then swelling and opening, huge dark-red flowers all shining and glossy like satin. Then they burst and fall to the ground. Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

3. #4 Behind one door, Tom Skelton, aged thirteen, stopped and listened. The wind outside nested in each tree, prowled the sidewalks in invisible treads like unseen cats. Tom Skelton shivered. Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows' Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked. Ray Bradbury, The Halloween Tree

4. #3 No human eye can isolate the unhappy coincidence of line and place which suggests evil in the face of a house, and yet somehow a maniac juxtaposition, a badly turned angle, some chance meeting of roof and sky, turned Hill House into a place of despair, more frightening because the face of Hill House seemed awake, with a watchfulness from the blank windows and a touch of glee in the eyebrow of a cornice. Almost any house, caught unexpectedly or at an odd angle, can turn a deeply humorous look on a watching person; even a mischievous little chimney, or a dormer like a dimple, can catch up a beholder with a sense of fellowship; but a house arrogant and hating, never off guard, can only be evil. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

5. #2 Behind them, distant, perhaps as much as three miles back, headlights twinkled like insignificant yellow sparks in the night. Stephen King, Christine

6. #1 She had more curves than the Monaco Grand Prix and was twice as dangerous. Raymond Chandler