“Can one drown in one's element... If fish can drown in water, can human beings suffocate in air?”

“Captain Ahab drowned, he reminded himself; it was the trimmer, Ishmael, who survived.”

“If a birth is the fall-out from the explosion caused by the union of two unstable elements, then perhaps a half-life is all we can expect. ”

“Music, love, death. Certainly a triangle of sorts; maybe even an eternal one."The only people who can see the whole picture," he murmured, "are the ones who step out of the frame." (The ground beneath her feet.)”

“The liveliness of literature lies in its exceptionality, in being the individual, idiosyncratic vision of one human being, in which, to our delight and great surprise, we may find our own vision reflected.”

“I sigh therefore I am . . . In the beginning and unto the end was and is the lung: divine afflatus, baby’s first yowl, shaped air of speech, staccato gusts of laughter, exalted airs of song, happy lover’s groan, unhappy lover’s lament, miser’s whine, crone’s croak, illness’s stench, dying whisper, and beyond and beyond the airless, silent void.A sigh isn’t just a sigh. We inhale the world and breathe out meaning. While we can. While we can.”

“They drove past buses that dripped people the way a sponge drips water, and arrived at a thick forest of human beings, a crowd of people sprouting in all directions like leaves on jungle trees.”