"I used to shut my eyes and let it shine redly through my lids. The sun was fantastic – it evoked dreams of explosion.…"

"I was jealous of people with a God to hang onto, whereas I … soon all I’d have left would be ‘eyes to cry with’."

"I can grovel at His feet if I believe He doesn’t exist."

"The difficulty—that contestation must be done in the name of an authority—is resolved this: I contest in the name of …"

"I sank into the moist body the way a well-guided plough sinks into earth. The earth beneath that body lay open like a…"

"He had porcelain-blue eyes that even in a lighted railway car were lost in the clouds, as if he had personally heard …"

"Each peal of music in the night was an incantatory summons to war and murder. The drum rolls were raised to their par…"

"Against this rising tide of murder, far more incisive than life (because blood is more resplendent in death than in l…"

"How can we linger over books to which their authors have manifestly not been driven? ... the freakish anomalies of Bl…"

"All that I had loved during my life rose up like a graveyard of white tombs, in a lunar, spectral light. Fundamentall…"