“Even the sky a hybrid — here clean and black and starred, there roiling with a brusque signature of cloud or piled in strata like folded linen or the interior of rock.”

“Out of the firelight everything was black and silver, black island, rocks and trees carved cleanly out of the sky and silver river with a flashing light rippling back and forth along the lip of the fall.”

“My experiences remind me that it's those black clouds that make the blue skies even more beautiful.”

“The stars cut into the inky black sky, like glinting shards of glass.”

“And he saw the right evening star reflected in her eyes, and he saw the black cloud reflected in her eyes.”

“The sky lay over the city like a map showing the strata of things and the big full moon toppled over in a furrow like the abandoned wheel of a gun carriage on a sunset field of battle and the shadows walked like cats and I looked into the white and ghostly interior of things and thought of you and I looked on their structural outsides and thought of you and was lonesome.”