“The instant of petrified violence that sometimes foreruns a summer storm saturated the hushed yard, and in the unearthly tinseled light rusty buckets of trailing fern which were strung round the porch like party lanterns appeared illuminated by a faint green inward flame.”

“... crystal spheres imprisoning green lizards, salamanders, millefiori bouquets dragonflies, a basket of pears, butterflies alighted on a frond of fern, swirls of pink and white and blue and white, shimmering like fireworks, cobras ready to strike, pretty little arrangements of pansies, magnificent poinsettias ...”

“Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.”

“She took off her dark glasses and squinted at me. It was as though her eyes were shattered prisms, the dots of blue and gray and green like broken bits of sparkle.”

“[F]or us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laugther; and with the garbage of liveliness stuffed down us untill our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying, in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.”

“Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local color and national character.”

“Šīs sievietes pievilcība slēpās viņas neglītumā, bet neglītums dažkārt spēj apburt pat vairāk nekā īsts skaistums- it sevišķi tad, ja satur paradoksu.”