"The night is cold and colder, a fog moves with menace in the streets. Malefic stirrings underfoot, a foul breath rising visibly from the pierced sewerlids. The watertruck goes by like a night-beast, its drum-shaped brush clanking. Water wells inkblack in the streets repeating the polelamps in glozy rosettes that dish and slide in the wash like radiolarians pale with phosphorus on a midnight sea. The sweepers broom the trash along the flooded gutters, their yellow slickers bright with wet. They leap to the truck and ride with brooms aloft like figures done in lacquered wax, like hortatory gnomes. The hotel nightlights shine behind the drawn Venetian blinds and the slatted patterns on the curb-side cars give them the look of anchored smallcraft with lapstrake hulls. Out there in the winter streets a few ashen anthroparians scuttling yet through the falling soot. Above them the shape of the city a colossal horde of retorts and alembics ranged against a starless sky. Uneasy sleeper you will live to see the city of your birth pulled down to the last stone."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
page 228
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Suttree
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Suttree
11 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Suttree →
Related Quotes
"In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching…"
"How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny f…"
"Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old t…"
"Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dem…"
"Pale manchild were there last agonies? Were you in terror, did you know? Could you feel the claw that claimed you? An…"
"He reached down and tapped Suttree's knee with his forefinger. You, my good buddy, are a fourteen carat gold plated s…"
"I believe it's the end of the world. What? Harrogate was looking at the pavement. He said it again. Look at me, Suttr…"
"The priest looked at him. Do I know you? he said. Suttree placed one hand on the pew in front of him. An old woman wa…"
"And what happens then? When? After you're dead. Dont nothing happen. You're dead. You told me once you believed in Go…"
"Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of citi…"