“A squalid phantasmagoria of breath”

“All good writing is like swimming underwater and holding your breath.”

“I want to know you moved and breathed in the same world with me.”

“A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about.”

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God.”

“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

“At first I was surprised and confused; then as he lay in his house and didn't move or breathe or speak hour upon hour it grew upon me that I was responsible, because no one else was interested--interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which everyone has some vague right at the end.”