“Her eyes were like the sea before a storm on the Carolina coast.”

“And her eyes, violet, like the sky before a storm. Ralph and Trish had brown eyes. Max's were hazel. But Ondine. No, Ondine's eyes had to be purple, wide set, and heavily lashed. Beyonce and Yoda's love child.”

“The acute scenes were still on our eyes, immediate and clear in the passion; and there were moments, too, in which we were outsiders and could draw away, as if we were in a plane and rose far, to a high focus above that coast, those cities, and this sea, with sight and feelings sharper than before”

“and then he looked her full in the face, and her heart leapt and sank, as the eyes the dangerous blue of the summer sky before a storm gazed back into hers.”

“Along the coast the sea roars, and inland the mountains roar – the roaring at the center, like a distant clap of thunder.”

“The morning was one peculiar to that coast. Everything was mute and calm; everything gray. The sea, though undulated into long roods of swells, seemed fixed, and was sleeked at the surface like waved lead that has cooled and set in the smelter's mould. The sky seemed a gray surtout. Flights of troubled gray fowl, kith and kin with flights of troubled gray vapors among which they were mixed, skimmed low and fitfully over the waters, as swallows over meadows before storms. Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows to come.”