“Gregor's glance then turned to the window. The dreary weather—therain drops were falling audibly down on the metal windowledge—made him quite melancholy.”

“Bina rolls her eyes, hands on her hips, glances at the door. Then she comes over and drops her bag and plops down beside him. How many times, he wonders, can she have enough of him, already, and still have not quite enough?”

“Man was matter. Drop him out of a window and he'll fall. Set fire to him and he'll burn. Bury him and he'll rot, like other kinds of garbage.”

“It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have made no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.”

“It seems melancholy weather.”“I prefer to think of it more as weather designed for reflection.”“You are the eternal optimist.”

“It formed into small drops on his weather beaten features, drops that rolled down his cheeks. Strangely, some of them tasted like salt.”