“They got up steam and proceeded calmly to the north - where there seemed to be no people, but only mountains, lakes, reedy snow-filled steppes, and winter gods who played with storms and stars.”

“Rigel, Betelgeuse, and Orion. There was no finer church, no finer choir, than the stars speaking in silence to the many consumptives silently condemned, a legion upon the dark rooftops. The wind came down from the north like a runner in lacrosse, violent and hard, to batter every living thing. They were there, each one alone in conversation with the stars, mining ephemeral love from cold and distant light.”

“They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.”

“As it somehow always manages before the winter solstice, but never after, the early darkness was cheerful and promising, even for those who had nothing.”

“You’ll join me sooner than you know in a place with . . . no illusions, where the truth is the only architecture, the only color, the only sound--where that which we sense merely on occasion, and which takes us up and gives us the rare and beautiful glimpses of the things we truly love, flows in deep rivers and tumbles about like clouds in the sky.”

“Shall I show you the half-dozen other rooms in this hospital where these scenes are repeated? And what of the other hospitals? Printing House Square is small and tame. Even in the private institutions uptown you can see a show just like this: there is nothing as disgusting as an obese cadaver in which all the futile pleasures of many years finally arise to fill it full-blown with stinking rotten gases. The city is burning and under siege. And we are in a war in which everyone is killed and no one is remembered.""What am I supposed to do, then," Peter Lake asked, "if it's like you say?""Is there someone you love?""Yes.""A woman?""Yes.""Then go home to her.""And who will remember her?""No one. That's just the point. You must take care of all that now.”

“There is justice in the world, Peter Lake, but it cannot be had without mystery.”