“The sun sets, the strange clouds glowing eerily like a full moon laced with arsenic and occult warnings. Eternity stretches out her mocking red carpet, hinting at the long lonely walk of regret I have ahead of me.”

“How like a queen comes forth the lonely Moon From the slow opening curtains of the clouds Walking in beauty to her midnight throne!”

“The sky is blue today, Max, and there is a big long cloud, and it's stretched out, like a rope. At the end of it, the sun islike a yellow hole. . .”

“The whole summer stretched out before us, long, hot, endless.September flashed like a tiny red warning light in the distance, but if I squinted, I could ignore it. I decided to squint for a while.'It's going to be wonderful,' I said.”

“In front of us, the ocean stretched for eternity. Around us, reggae mussy floated through the air. In our drying clothes and still-damp hair, we ate junk food and talked.At some point we finished and went for a long walk in the sand. We picked up shells, laughed, and talked. Before I knew it, the sun was going down and we went back to the van. We lay side by side, stretched out on the blanket. When the sun dropped completely below the horizon, we let the moon illuminate us.”

“I see the mountains in the sky; the great clouds; and the moon; I have a great and astonishing sense of something there, which is “it”—it is not exactly beauty that I mean. It is that the thing is in itself enough: satisfactory, achieved. A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth is there too: of the infinite oddity of the human position; with the moon up there and those mountain clouds.”