“On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed....the taper was interrupted..and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.”

“It was all down, down, down, gradually--ruin and levelling and disappearance. Then it was all up, up, up, gradually, as seeds grew to saplings, and saplings to forest trees, and bramble and fern came creeping in to help.”

“No my friend, darkness is not everywhere, for here and there I find faces illuminated from within; paper lanterns among the dark trees.”

“The image of a well-dressed older woman making on a goopish spoonful of artificial boon spooge was running across the lobes of his brain like a stuttering nightmare.”

“New York City in life was much like New York City in death. It was still hard to get a cab, for example.”

“If these pages are thick with death, think of the battlefield. Corpses in different stages of decay, the slowly dying, moments of death exist around you everywhere. Who are you? You are among the living, but can you be certain?”