“By early evening all the sky to the north had darkened and the spare terrain they trod had turned a neuter gray as far as the eye could see. They grouped in the road at the top of a rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place n the iron dark of the world.”

“From this close, she could see the color of his eyes perfectly. They were a misty, shifting blue marbled with gray, like smoke rising through an early morning sky.”

“The winter sky has already turned black, but I could still see Wesley's gray eyes in the darkness. They were exactly the color of the sky before a thunderstorm.”

“We were sitting side by side, with our legs swinging on the wall of the tower, and the Clouds™ were all turning pink in front of us. We could see all these miles of filet mignon from where we were sitting, and some places where the genetic coding had gone wrong and there, in the middle of the beef, the tissue had formed a horn or an eye or a heart blinking up at the sunset, which was this brag red, and which hit on all these miles of muscle and made it flex and quiver, with all these shudders running across the top of it, and birds were flying over, crying kind of sad, maybe looking for garbage, and the whole thing, with the beef and the birds and the sky, it glowed like there was a light inside it, which it was time to show us now.”

“When they arrived in full, the noise of their feet throbbed on top of the road. Their eyes were enormous in their starving skulls. And the dirt. The dirt was molded to them . . . Their feet could barely rise above the ground . . . Stars of David were plastered on their shirts, and misery was attached to them as if assigned. "Don't forget your misery . . ."At their side, the soldiers also made their way pat, ordering them to hurry up and stop moaning. Some of the those soldiers were only boys. They had the Fuhrer in their eyes.”

“Harry felt winded, as though he had just walked into something heavy. He had last seen those cool gray eyes through slits in a Death Eater’s hood, and last heard that man’s voice jeering in a dark graveyard while Lord Voldemort tortured him. He could not believe that Lucius Malfoy dared look him in the face; he could not believe that he was here, in the Ministry of Magic, or that Cornelius Fudge was talking to him, when Harry had told Fudge mere weeks ago that Malfoy was a Death Eater.”