“By night the skyscraper looms in the smoke and the stars and has a soul.”

“Everything that's born has to die, which means our lives are like skyscrapers. The smoke rises at different speeds, but they're all on fire, and we're all trapped.”

“At night the sky was very near, sprawled in star smoke and gamma cataclysms, but she didn't see it the way she used to, as soul extension, dumb guttural wonder, a thing that lived outside language in the oldest part of her.”

“Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of the night, or the firefly the stars? And shall your flame or your smoke burden the wind?”

“The word "America" has well-developed grandiose associations for a Soviet person, for whom it refers to a country of skyscrapers, where day and night one hears the unceasing thunder of surface and underground trains, the hellish roar of automobile horns, and the continuous despairing screams of stockbrokers rushing through the skyscrapers waving their ever-falling shares.”

“Lay me on an anvil, O God.Beat me and hammer me into a crowbar.Let me pry loose old walls.Let me lift and loosen old foundations. Lay me on an anvil, O God.Beat me and hammer me into a steel spike.Drive me into the girders that hold a skyscraper together.Take red-hot rivets and fasten me into the central girders.Let me be the great nail holding a skyscraper through blue nights into white stars.”