“The hard rain nailed the night to the city.”

“From twelve stories up it was easy to be fooled by the city's rain-swept beauty, by the millions of lights twinkling in the night. But all I had to do was turn my head to see the truth: a child-whore asleep in her hospital bed. It could rain forever and the city would never be clean.”

“After an age of leaves and feathers someone dead thought of the mountain as money and cut the trees that were here and the wind and the rain at night. It is hard to say it.”

“Even the rain in its night singing, / the night rain in its forgetting, / is a kind of light.”

“It's raining in my heart, like it's raining in the city. What is this sadness that pierces my heart?”

“And what does the rain say at night in a small town, what does the rain have to say? Who walks beneath dripping melancholy branches listening to the rain? Who is there in the rain’s million-needled blurring splash, listening to the grave music of the rain at night, September rain, September rain, so dark and soft? Who is there listening to steady level roaring rain all around, brooding and listening and waiting, in the rain-washed, rain-twinkled dark of night?”