“Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail the sky cracked its poems in naked wonder, that the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze, leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder”

“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,The flying cloud, the frosty light;The year is dying in the night;Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.Ring out the old, ring in the new,Ring, happy bells, across the snow:The year is going, let him go;Ring out the false, ring in the true.”

“Do not, do not, do not books for ever hammer at people like perpetual bells? When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad.”

“Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell,' Holly advised him. 'That was Doc's mistake. He was always lugging home wild things. A hawk with a hurt wing. One time it was a full-grown bobcat with a broken leg. But you can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get. Until they're strong enough to run into the woods. Or fly into a tree. Then a taller tree. Then the sky. That's how you'll end up, Mr. Bell. If you let yourself love a wild thing. You'll end up looking at the sky.""She's drunk," Joe Bell informed me. "Moderately," Holly confessed....Holly lifted her martini. "Let's wish the Doc luck, too," she said, touching her glass against mine. "Good luck: and believe me, dearest Doc -- it's better to look at the sky than live there. Such an empty place; so vague. Just a country where the thunder goes and things disappear.”

“It's as if there's a landscape - we'll call it childhood - which exists in our mind. It's completely familiar. Unspeakably familiar. Until in the middle of the night, when the sky is blackest, lightning cracks through the firmament. And in that crush of sound, amid the madness and the blinding flash, you see your world: home, trees, rooftops, your own hand, in an entirely new way. Illumined by fire. Flashed for half a second and then gone. And it's that image, that savage, rip-through-the-curtain vision, that lingers. Not the reality you see every day. Not the world you walk around in. No, it's that spookhouse glimpse, the scorching peek through the blackness, that stays in the brain.”

“A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths. ”