“Sometimes it seemed to him that his life was delicate as a dandelion. One little puff from any direction, and it was blown to bits.”

“His soul, it seemed to him, was more than empty. It was desiccated, reduced to the powder of its substance and now in danger of being blown away by the first puff of the dawn wind that presaged the sun.”

“...little creatures they were who seemed to have been blown from glass.”

“He saw the delicate blades of grass which the bodies of his comrades had fertilized; he saw the little shoots on the shell-shocked trees. He saw the smoke-puffs of shrapnel being blown about by light breezes. He saw birds making love in the wire that a short while before had been ringing with flying metal. He heard the pleasant sounds of larks up there, near the zenith of the trajectories. He smiled a little. There was something profoundly saddening about it. It all seemed so fragile and so absurd.”

“It takes so little, a tiny puff of air, for things to shift imperceptibly and whatever it was that a man was ready to lay down his life for a few seconds earlier, seems suddenly to be sheer nonsense”

“I watch the ashes swim around like dandelion puffs, making swirls where bodies and walls once stood.”