“We are voyagers, discoverersof the not-known,the unrecorded;we have no map;possibly we will reach haven,heaven.”

“Pompeii has nothing to teach us,we know crack of volcanic fissure,slow flow of terrible lava,pressure on heart, lungs, the brainabout to burst its brittle case(what the skull can endure!)”

“Could beauty be caught and hurtthey had done her to death with their sneersin ages and ages past,could beauty be sacrificedfor a thrust of a sword,for a piece of thin moneytossed up to fall half alloy—then beauty were deadlong, long before we saw her face.”

“As writers, we feel things deeper than other people, we hurt more, we love bigger, we cry harder and we smile wider. This is the essence, the fuel, to what we do.”

“I have tasted words, I have seen them. Never had her hands reached out in darkness and felt the texture of pure marble, never had her forehead bent forward and, as against a stone altar, felt safety. I am now saved. Her mind could not then so specifically have seen it, could not have said, "Now I will reveal myself in words, words may now supercede a scheme of mathematical-biological definition. Words may be my heritage and with words...A lady will be set back in the sky....there was hope in a block of unsubstantiated marble, words could carve and set up solid altars...Thought followed the wing that beat its silver into seven-branched larch boughs.”

“Where are my manners? We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Surah.”

“She wanted George with some uncorrelated sector of Her Gart, she wanted George to correlate for her, life here, there. She wanted George to define and to make definable a mirage, a reflection of some lost incarnation, a wood maniac, a tree demon, a neuropathic dendrophile...She wanted George to make the thing an integral, herself integrity. She wanted George to make one of his drastic statements that would dynamite her world away for her. She wanted this, but even as she wanted it she let herself sink further, further, she saw that her two hands reached toward George like the hands of a drowned girl. She knew she was not drowned. Where others would drown-lost, suffocated in this element-she knew that she lived. She had no complete right yet to this element, hands struggled to be pulled out. White hands waved above the water like sea spume or inland-growing pond flowers...She wanted George to pull her out, she wanted George to push her in, let Her be drowned utterly.”