“The word 'ivory' rang in the air, was whispered, was sighed. You would think they were praying to it. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew through it all, like a whiff from some corpse.”

“A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths. ”

“When the Universe folds into a sigh,Withdrawing from all agony and grief,Time will cease its flowing, and with reliefThe cosmic Breath will freeze and Time will die.Evil souls that once were us ariseTo devour the corpse, like clouds of flies.”

“Why did women always believe that talking about a problem would fix it? Some issues were corpses. Hot air made them fester and rot and spread their disease to everything else. Better to bury it and move on.”

“She would have liked to sit upon a rock and listen to words, not of any man, but detached, mysterious, poetic words that she alone would interpret through some sense inherited from sleep.”

“Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.”