“...only the peak feels so sound and stable that the beginning of the falling is hidden for a little while...”

“Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.”

“Even sound seemed to fail in this air, like the air was worn out with carrying sounds so long.”

“How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound,the weary gestures wearily recapitulant:echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-string:in sunset we fall into furious attitudes,dead gestures of dolls.”

“...I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other; and that sin and love and fear are just sounds that people who never sinned nor loved nor feared have for what they never had and cannot have until they forget the words.”

“When you opened the door a bell tinkled, but just once, high and clear and small in the neat obscurity above the door, as though it were gauged and tempered to make that single clear small sound so as not to wear the bell out nor to require the expenditure of too much silence in restoring it when the door opened upon the recent warm scent of baking; a little dirty child with eyes like a toy bear's and two patent-leather pigtails.”

“And so I told myself to take that one. Because Father said clocks slay time. He said time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life. The hands were extended, slightly off the horizontal at a faint angle, like a gull tilting into the wind.”