“The afternoon breeze would incite to a weird and flabby activity all that crowded mass of clothing, with its vague suggestions of drowned, mutilated and flattened humanity. Trunks without heads waved at you arms without hands; legs without feet kicked fantastically with collapsible flourishes; and there were long white garments, that taking the wind fairly through their neck openings edged with lace, became for a moment violently distended as by the passage of obese and invisible bodies. On these days you could make out that ship at a great distance by the multi-coloured grotesque riot going on abaft her mizzen-mast.”

“Black-and-white chickens stagger around Colonial Dunsboros, chickens with their heads flattened. Here are chickens with no wings or only one leg. There are chickens with no legs, swimming with just their ragged wings through the barnyard mud. Blind chickens without eyes. Without beaks. Born that way. Defective. Born with their little chicken brains already scrambled. There's an invisible line between science and sadism, but here it's made visible.”

“I will go back to the great sweet mother,Mother and lover of men, the sea.I will go down to her, I and none other,Close with her, kiss her, and mix her with me.Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast;O fair white mother, in days long passedBorn without sister, born without brother,Set free my soul as thy soul is free.”

“One day he became conscious that something was following him, a lazy white dog, a bitch with heavy dugs, padded behind him, whining continuously. When Balian sat collapsed in the shadows of the houses, the dog would circle him, breathing heavily and whining, her lips hanging loose in a sly sort of grin. In streets, in deserted ruins and in crowded market places Balian was aware that a flabby white shadow trailed behind him, and at nights, when Balian slept in the open, the dog would lie down too at a distance, panting in the hot night air.”

“Lying asleep between the strokes of nightI saw my love lean over my sad bed,Pale as the duskiest lily's leaf or head,Smooth-skinned and dark, with bare throat made to bite,Too wan for blushing and too warm for white,But perfect-coloured without white or red.And her lips opened amorously, and said--I wist not what, saving one word--Delight. And all her face was honey to my mouth,And all her body pasture to my eyes;The long lithe arms and hotter hands than fire,The quivering flanks, hair smelling of the south,The bright light feet, the splendid supple thighsAnd glittering eyelids of my soul's desire.”

“Maybe nothingness is to be without your presence, without you moving, slicing the noon like a blue flower, without you walking later through the fog and the cobbles, without the light you carry in your hand, golden, which maybe others will not see,which maybe no one knew was growing like the red beginnings of a rose. In short, without your presence: without your coming suddenly, incitingly, to know my life, gust of a rosebush, wheat of wind: since then I am because you are, since then you are, I am, we are, and through love I will be, you will be, we will be.”