“...yes, words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.”

“Look: if a bird were to rub its beak on a limb, you’d hear it—sure—and if a piece of water were to move an unaccustomed way, you’d feel it—that’s right—and if a fox were to steal a hen, you’d see-you’d see it—even in the middle of the night; but, heaven help you, if a friend a friend—god—were to slit your throat with his—his love—hoh, you’d bleed a week to notice it.”

“His dark room now seemed cool and restfully confining. You could imagine maps in the wallpaper. The roses had faded into vague shells of pink. Only a few silver lines along the vanished stems and in the veins of leaves, indistinct patches of the palest green remained—the faint suggestion of mysterious geography. A grease spot was a marsh, a mountain or a treasure. Irabestis went boating down a crack on cool days, under the tree boughs, bending his head. He fished in a chip of plaster. The perch rose to the bait and were golden in the sunwater. Specks stood for cities; pencil marks were bridges; stains and shutter patterns laid out fields of wheat and oats and corn. In the shadow of a corner the crack issued into a great sea. There was a tear in the paper that looked exactly like a railway and another that signified a range of hills. Some tiny drops of ink formed a chain of lakes. A darker decorative strip of Grecian pediments and interlacing ivy at the ceiling’s edge kept the tribes of Gog and Magog from invasion. Once he had passed through it to the ceiling but it made him dizzy and afraid. Shadows moved quixotically over the whole wall, usually from left to right in tall thin bands, and sank behind the bureau or below the bed or disappeared suddenly in a corner.”

“The things that stayed were things that didn't matter except they stayed, night and day, all seasons the same, and were peaceful to a fault and boded no ill but thought well enough of themselves to repeat their presences.”

“I built, of blocks, a town three hundred thousand strong, whose avenues were paved with a wine-colored rug and decorated by large leaves outlined inappropriately in orange, and on this leafage I'd often park my Tootsie Toy trucks, as if on pads of camouflage, waiting their deployment against catastrophes which included alien invasions, internal treachery, and world war. It was always my intention, and my conceit, to use up, in the town's construction, every toy I possessed: my electronic train, of course, the Lincoln Logs, old kindergarten blocks—their deeply incised letters always a problem—the Erector set, every lead soldier that would stand (broken ones were sent to the hospital), my impressive array of cars, motorcycles, tanks, and trucks—some with trailers, some transporting gas, some tows, some dumps—and my squadrons of planes, my fleet of ships, my big and little guns, an undersized group of parachute people (looking as if one should always imagine them high in the sky, hanging from threads), my silversided submarines, along with assorted RR signs, poles bearing flags, prefab houses with faces pasted in their windows, small boxes of a dozen variously useful kinds, strips of blue cloth for streams and rivers, and glass jars for town water towers, or, in a pinch, jails. In time, the armies, the citizens, even the streets would divide: loyalties, friendships, certainties, would be undermined, the city would be shaken by strife; and marbles would rain down from formerly friendly planes, steeples would topple onto cars, and shellfire would soon throw aggie holes through homes, soldiers would die accompanied by my groans, and ragged bands of refugees would flee toward mountain caves and other chairs and tables.”

“Is it really possible that the finest sensations in life are simple: the delicate brush of Lou’s hair across my chest, for instance? Yes. It is possible. Or was it the feeling I felt in each length as they drifted over me, the love I perceived in their gentle tickle? Yes. That was possible too. With Lou’s soft first kiss, wasn’t it mainly the miracle of its happening at all which made it so wondrous, so plainly impossible? And was I waiting on the stair for the world’s wind to do the same, to display for me that rare union of meaning, gesture, and understanding, which the artist gnaws up knuckles to achieve? O. Oooh…the decades I’ve done in and then abandoned without even waiting for the wounds to bleed!”

“Why were they whining then?...whining, damn them, whining… Because they’d have to give up their hope of living like an animal and return to an honest, conscious, human life. The prospect was hard.”