“It is one thing to look at a mistreated boat and another to look at a tomb. The silence of the bay seemed more intense. And I could see the glint of the carrion flies.”

“Look at the moon. How strange the moon seems! She is like a woman rising from a tomb. She is like a dead woman. One might fancy she was looking for dead things.”

“Everybody wants to fly. At some stage in their lives, everyone looks up in the sky and sees the seemingly effortlessness of a bird in the gulf of air overhead and thinks: I wish, just one time, that could be me.”

“Is that it?”“No. That’s a wall.”“It could be disguised.”“You’re not very good at looking for things, are you?”“I’m good at looking for walls. Look, I found another one.”

“I see a glint in her eye as she looks at me and it makes me smile. Hold our breath? she seems to say. Move the earth? We've been doing that all along.”

“I wouldn't presume to define noir - if we could define it, we wouldn't need to use a French word for it - but it seems to me it's more a way of looking at the world than what one sees.”