“Through this image he had a glimpse of a strange dark cavern of speculation but at once turned away from it, feeling that it was not yet the hour to enter it. But the nightshade of his friend's listlessness seemed to be diffusing in the air around him a tenuous and deadly exhalation and he found himself glancing from one casual word to another on his right or left in stolid wonder that they had been so silently emptied of instantaneous sense until every mean shop legend bound his mind like the words of a spell and his soul shrivelled up, sighing with age as he walked on in a lane among heaps of dead language. His own consciousness of language was ebbing from his brain and trickling into the very words themselves which set to band and disband themselves in wayward rhythms:The ivy whines upon the wallAnd whines and twines upon the wallThe ivy whines upon the wallThe yellow ivy on the wallIvy, ivy up the wall.Did any one ever hear such drivel?”

“The junkie whine had vanished from his voice now, replaced with a resigned flatness, as if the words were being broadcast from a long, long way away, dead words being sent out on a dead frequency.”

“He was smiling again, his face alight, and Ivy knew her own expression was a mirror to his. Ivoleyn, he said, softly now, as if testing the word. And she replied, Dashton. Then their hands parted, but only so they might come closer, like two trees twining together to stand as one in a forest of green.”

“He was as obsequious as a Japanese ivy plant. Wringing his hands as if he hoped to squeeze the milk of human kindness from his fingernails, ...”

“Words that had looked so strong on the page, which ran through his mind like music, now shriveled in the air around him.”

“why had he happened to hear such a discussion and such ideas at the very moment when his own brain was just conceiving … the very same ideas? And why, just at the moment when he had brought away the embryo of his idea from the old woman had he dropped at once upon a conversation about her? This coincidence always seemed strange to him. This trivial talk in a tavern had an immense influence on him in his later action; as though there had really been in it something preordained, some guiding hint…”