“Broken glass showered from the windows. Chunks of the walls bounced off the pavement and the cars parked along the curb, crushing into smaller pieces. The asphalt on the street split in places into long ribbon-like slashes. The ground continued rolling like the deck of a ship. The noise of the destruction, screams of terrified people, and the car alarms mixed into a concerto of horror.”

“The streets were awash with blues and grays – suspended in the air, bouncing off buildings, reflecting off car windows – as Brooklyn neared nighttime.”

“I glared daggers at him, but they just bounced off him like water on a freshly waxed car.”

“Kingbitter, as he did frequently nowadays, was standing at his window and looking out onto the street below. This street offered the most mundane and ordinary sights of Budapest's mundane and ordinary streets. The muck-, oil-, and dog-dirt-spattered sidewalk was lined with parked cars, and in the one-yard gaps between the cars and the leprotically peeling house walls the most mundane and ordinary passersby were attempting to go about their business, their hostile features an outward clue to their dark thoughts. Every now and then, perhaps in a hurry to overtake the single file inching along the front, one of them would step off the sidewalk, only for an entire chorus of rancorous car horns to give the lie to any groundless hope of breaking free from the line.”

“...occasionally I wished I could walk through a picture window and have the sharp, broken shards slash me to ribbons so I would finally look like I felt.”

“When you drop a glass or a plate to the ground it makes a long crashing sound. When a window shatters, a table leg breaks, or when a picture falls off the wall it makes a noise. But as for your heart, when that breaks, it's completely silent. You would think as it's so important it would make the loudest noise in the whole world, or even have some sort of ceremonious sound like the gong of a cymbal or the ringing of a bell. But it's silent and you almost wish there was a noise to distract you from the pain.”