“I am wrapped round with phrases, like damp straw; I glow, phosphorescent.”

“All places where the French settled have corruption at their heart, a kind of soft, rotten glow, like the phosphorescence of decaying wood, that is oddly attractive.”

“I know of no place where the wind can be as icy and the damp so penetrating as in Oxford round about Easter time.”

“When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.”

“...his eyes lit up and glowed red against the dark bulk of it. A moment they remained so ... then they soared up, phosphorescently opalescent, with a predominance of red, like two sinful dead planets escaping from Hell.”

“I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing….I’m a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping. Inside it is a space, huge as the sky at night and dark and curved like that, though black-red rather than black.”