“The way a source strains toward the light, toward the air. Its laboring work, its effort, its black passageways like despair. That’s the way a poet looks for words. With muscles, gestures.”

“[Kane to Rose] I'll never forget the way you looked walking toward me. I never thought that I'd have a woman like you in my life. It's all there etched in my brain. And now, the way the light pours over our hair, the way all that silk shines, so black it's nearly blue. The world disappears when I'm holding you.”

“For a sentence is not complete unless each word, once its syllables have been pronounced, gives way to make room for the next...They are set up on the course of their existence, and the faster they climb towards its zenith, the more they hasten towards the point where they exist no more.”

“The sleeve covered its appendages well until it reached outward to Grady. Instead of a hand, several dark green and black-splotched tentacles spilled out of the sleeve. They snaked through the air toward Grady’s face. They glistened in the early morning light and long strands of a mucous-like substance dripped from them and clung like shiny webs to its robe.”

“That— we seemed to have decided without saying a word— might go a long way toward spoiling something that was special, and beautiful, by virtue of its strangeness and delicacy.”

“Clawing its way towards us, the ugliness of the world tore away our hiding-place.”