And it was this that awed him — the weird combination of fixity and…

Through Chance, we are each a ghost to all the others, and our only reality; through Chance, the huge hinge of the world, and a grain of dust; the stone that starts an avalanche, the pebble whose concentric circles widen across the seas.

Nacreous pearl light swam faintly about the hem of the lilac darkness; the edges of light and darkness were stitched upon the hills. Morning moved like a pearl-gray tide across the fields and up the hillflanks, flowing rapidly down into …

Most of the time we think we're sick, it's all in the mind.

It was like a dream of hell, when a man finds his own name staring at him from the Devil's ledger; like a dream of death, when he who comes as mourner finds himself in the coffin, or as witness to a hanging, the condemned upon the scaffold.

The exquisite smell of the south, clean but funky, like a big woman.

The old church, with its sharp steeple, rotted slowly, decently, prosperously, like a good man's wife.