Diction Analysis Passges
The Scarlet Letter – Passage One
After a brief pause, the physician turned away.
But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician's ecstasy from Satan's was the trait of wonder in it!
The Scarlet Letter – Passage Two
She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester, that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could, and as intelligently as she knew how, to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. It showed Pearl in an unwonted aspect. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little other return than the waywardness of an April breeze; which spends its time in airy sport, and has its gusts of inexplicable passion, and is petulant in its best of moods, and chills oftener than caresses you, when you take it to your bosom; in requital of which misdemeanours it will sometimes, of its own vague purpose, kiss your cheek with a kind of doubtful tenderness, and play gently with your hair, and then begone about its other idle business, leaving a dreamy pleasure at your heart. And this, moreover, was a mother’s estimate of the child’s disposition.
The Color of Water – Passage One
The white kids in school did not believe me, and after weeks of encouragement I found myself standing in front of the classroom on Talent Day, wearing my brother’s good shoes and hitching up my pants, soul singer-style like are of the Temptations, as someone dropped the needle on a James Brown record. I slid around the way I’d seen him do, shouting “Owww-shabba-na!” They were delighted. Ever the teacher was amused. They really believed I could dance! I had them fooled. They screamed for more and I obliged, squiggling my feet and slip-sliding across the wooden floor, jumping into the air and landing in a near split by the blackboard, shouting “Eeee-yowwww!” They went wild, but even as I sat down with their applause ringing in my ears, with laughter on my face, happy to feel accepted, to be part of them, knowing I had pleased them, I saw the derision on their faces, the clever smiles laughing at the oddity of it, and I felt the same ache I felt when I gazed at the boy in the mirror. I remembered him, and how free he was, and I hated him even more.
The Color of Water – Passage Two
Chicken Man was a small man with deep, rich, almost copper-toned skin, a wrinkled face, and laughing eyes. He wore an old fishing hat that seemed to cover his entire face, and plaid pants that left about two inches of sock and four inches of ankle showing. He smelled of liquor and beer all the time but he kept a pocket full of candy which he laid on the various children who came by the liquor store to see him, some his kin and some not. You could see him coming from a distance, appearing out of nowhere like an angel, his silhouette seeming to rise from the ground in the simmering, though he actually emerged from one of the ramshackle houses that lined the road a half-mile away. He’d stagger up Thirty-fourth Street like a wandering bird lost in flight, his hands spread out at his sides like he was flying, waving at cars that honked at him, arriving on the Corner at two P.M. drunk. He’d set up shop on the Corner like it was his office, sitting in the front of the liquor store on a wood crate and drinking till he ran out of liquor or money, at which time he’d stagger off, blindly drunk, laughing at some silly philosophy he’d just laid down.