“But the actual object, that bundle of papers, is a telltale heart. She buried it long ago, and still it thumps its maddening beat.”

“There weren't words for it. It was like trying to photograph a sunset or telling the story of a dream dreamt, a private intensity, and attempts at its reproduction could only be met with a shrug.”

“Sometimes, the world suddenly seemed equal to what I required of it. But, otherwise, I was under the world, a cockroach-man scuttling beneath stones in filth, scrambling from the light. Or else I was above the world, as certain and mighty as a fundamental force, as electricity. The sadness of always being at a distance from things, above or else beneath.”

“Frederick knows better than to believe, as his wife sometimes claims to, that all things happen for a reason. Things happen; it is up to us to invent for them a purpose.”

“...that the basic transaction of life itself was a sad, endless amalgam of public endurance and private indulgence.”

“She was at that crucial age when a women begins to regret having stayed faithful to a husband she never really loved, when the glowing sunset colors of her beauty offer her one last, urgent choice between maternal and feminine love. At such a moment a life that seemed to have chosen its course long ago is questioned once again, for the last time the magic compass needle of the will hovers between final resignation and the hope of erotic experience.”

“Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translationAnd every bit of us is lost in it(Or found — I wander through the ruin of SNow and then, wondering at the peacefulness)And in that loss a self-effacing tree,Color of context, imperceptiblyRustling with its angel, turns the wasteTo shade and fiber, milk and memory.”