“. . . a stiff breeze had claimed Athens, filling bedrooms, rearranging the tops of desks, touching everything and nothing, as if searching for something it no longer recognized.”

“Something inside me had dropped away, and nothing came in to fill the cavern.”

“We labored under the pretense that nothing had changed when everything had, and I understood him, but i no longer knew him.”

“The man may not be dead, but he was certainly stiff. And this had nothing to do with rigor mortis.”

“It was all there in that little disc-London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk.”

“I could no longer picture Rosalind in my mind's eye; the tender vision of the girl in white had been blown to pieces as if by a nuclear bomb. This was something unimaginable, something hollow as the yellowed husks that insects leave behind in dry grass, blowing with cold alien winds and a fine corrosive dust that shredded everything it touched.”