“As little flowers, which the chill of night has bent and huddled, when the white sun strikes, grow straight and open fully on their stems, so did I, too, with my exhausted force.”

“I think of the flower in the bud: huddled, compressed, dark. Yet somehow it feels the night, knows moon from sun. It waits...waits.”

“I like it when a flower or a little tuft of grass grows through a crack in the concrete. It's so fuckin' heroic.”

“My prodding me didn't elicit a reaction. His unseeing eyes stared straight through me. Which was odd. He'd seemed so sane huddled in Cookie's trunk.”

“The city grows like a cancer; I must grow like a sun. The city eats deeper and deeper into the red; it is an insatiable white louse which must die eventually of inanition. I am going to starve the white louse which is eating me up. I am going to die as a city in order to become again a man. Therefore I close my ears, my eyes, my mouth.”

“There are times when the midsummer sun strikes cold, and when the leaping flames of a hearthfire give no heat. Times when the chill within us comes not from fears we know, but from fears unknown-and forever unknowable.”