“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.”

“She is, above all else, tired; she wants more than anything to return to her bed and her book. The world, this world, feels suddenly stunned and stunted, far from everything.”

“The hard and mighty lie beneath the groundWhile the tender and weak dance on the breeze above.”

“I saw the void beneath the surface of the world; it threatened to pull me under.”

“What should I believe? thought Shadow, and the voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything.”

“My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.”