“It was well past midnight, quiet, few people around. All noises had retreated. The night seemed to have its own resonance. At that hour, the city's a gong that was struck at noon and is not yet quite still.”

“Tonight, I feel small. An entire night in the city seems to be too much for me, too immense for me to get lost in. By now it's past one, the after-hours city is in full swing, and morning is a long way off.”

“Even at midnight the city groans in the heat. We have had no rain for quite a while. The traffic sounds below ride the night air in waves of trigonometry, the cosine of a siren, the tangent of a sigh, a system, an axis, a logic to this chaos, yes.”

“Like a snake creeping through the undergrowth, I sneak into the law school well past noon and hours after both of my scheduled classes have broken up.”

“There is a night that never comes to an end....The clock of the world turns under its own shadow. Midnight is a moving place, hurtling around the planet at a thousand miles an hour like a dark knike, cutting slices of daily bread off the endless loaf of Time.”

“All of it seems like noise and false light, and all I want for tonight is quiet, the black and gray of a summer night, and a girl in a pink dress, beside me forever.”