“Blaise decided that the thing he would remember most about this London was the sour stink of it. The overripe foulness of the streets made him gag, and when a woman emptied a chamber pot from a top window, nearly catching him in its spray, he bent over and wretched, much to the Nightsneaks' amusement.”

“A merrier baby than he had never been seen. Everything he glimpsed around him roused his interest and stirred him to joy. He looked with delight at the threads of rain outside the window, as if they were confetti and multicolored streamers. And if, as happens, the sunlight reached the ceiling indirectly and cast the shadows of the street's morning bustle, he would stare as it fascinated, refusing to abandon it, as if he were watching an extraordinary display of Chinese acrobats, given especially or him. You would have said, to tell the truth, from his laughter, from the constant brightening of his little face, that he didn't see things only in their usual aspects, but as multiple images of other things, varying to infinity. Otherwise, there was no explaining why the wretched, monotonous scene the house offered every day could afford him such diverse, inexhaustible amusement.”

“He thought about all the holes in him, the blank places, the voids where others felt things. When it came down to it, he was really just a screen, more empty than solid, his emotions blowing through him, only angry catching and holding.”

“I felt about him as I might feel about a friendly, dimwitted dog that had decided to move in with us. He could not be cast out into the street, but he was shedding all over the furniture.”

“And me not sleeping tonight or tomorrow night or any night for a long while, now that this has started. And he thought of her lying on the bed with the two technicians standing straight over her, not bent with concern, but only standing straight, arms folded. And he remembered thinking then that if she died, he was certain he wouldn’t cry. For it would be the dying of an unknown, a street face, a newspaper image, and it was suddenly so very wrong that he had begun to cry, not at death but at the thought of not crying at death, a silly empty man near a silly empty woman, while the hungry snake made her still more empty.How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn’t it? ‘What a shame! You’re not in love with anyone!’ And why not?”

“. . . he lies on the couch with only his pants, boots and bandages wrapped around him. I thought about taking off his pants and boots when I sprayed the blood off him in the shower, but decided that I wasn’t here to make him comfortable.”