“Echoing streets melt into dark autumn rooms—melt to black plastic bags inflated by the wind and spinning on playground blacktop like free-floating punctuation...the horizon is just a line and past it there's only black dark...that rolls toward her as she walks in its direction...smooth-worn wooden chairs at the bakery where ella sits tea on the table in front of her, it's getting dark but the girl behind the counter hasn't turned on a single light yet...Ella animal staring into the street: “Did I ever touch him?”

“The sky all at once is overhead dim and grey, puzzle of blocks sprawl, their own horizon; the city looks like a cemetery full of weak daylight, cool and a little wrong, making Ella feel a little put upon, like leap-year day—nothing in itself, but a nudge jostling every other day.”

“She starkly sees her inanimate future blocked out before her right through to her own end—without him... ...and worst of all, she knows she will be asked about him and be called upon to talk about him and tell the story again and again...her jaws will work without end with all that talking her jaws will chew up the ravel of all her remaining life, telling the same story until it becomes bare and alien and something blunt to her; more the belonging of other people, and no longer hers. Now she has to live ordinarily...she's going to have to numb herself if she's going to go on—no going on from this point without getting numb.”

“The wind seems to be blowing through the gaps in the conversation like the rushing of empty space.”

“She loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent, or one time in her room when light from the valley's city, finally free of curfew, rose among them like twilight and lit the colour of his body.”

“On this particular autumn night, only the prospect of another solitary evening lies before her. She will fry her chop and read herself to sleep, no doubt with a tale of wizardry and romance. Then, in dreams that strike even her as trite, Miss Dark will go adventuring in chain mail and silk. Tomorrow morning she will wake up alone, and do it all again. Poor Judy Dark! Poor little librarians of the world, those girls, secretly lovely, their looks marred forever by the cruelty of a pair of big black eyeglasses!”

“What it must feel like to lie back with cut wrists in a warm bath, a voluptuous dwindling feeling.”