“A carnival in daylight is an unfinished beast, anyway. Rain makes it a ghost. The wheezing music from the empty, motionless rides in a soggy, rained-out afternoon midway always hit my chest with a sweet ache. The colored dance of the lights in the seeping air flashed the puddles in the sawdust with an oily glamour.”

“His sadness was almost palpable, like moisture in the air before it rains. Although this was Manchester, it was probably about to rain anyway.”

“Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.”

“Rain in the graveyard, and the world puddled into blurred reflections.”

“So the carnival steams by, shakes ANY tree: it rains jackasses.”

“The spectacles of pain and disgrace I see around me, the ignorance, the unthinking vice, the poverty and the lack of hope, and oh, the rain—the rain that falls on England and rots the grain, puts out the light in the man’s eye and the light of learning too, for who can reason if Oxford is a giant puddle and Cambridge is washing away downstream, and who will enforce the laws if the judges are swimming for their lives?”