"The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream."

"This is the nature of modern death. It has a life independent of us. It is growing in prestige and dimension. It has a sweep it never had before. We study it objectively. We can predict its appearance, trace its path in the body. We can take cross-section pictures of it, tape its tremors and waves. We've never been so close to it, so familiar with its habits and attitudes. We know it intimately. But it continues to grow, to acquire breadth and scope, new outlets, new passages and means. The more we learn, the more it grows."

"There was no large city with a vaster torment we might use to see our own dilemma in some soothing perspective."

"I stood there amazed, watching her walk in little circles of hilarity, weak-kneed, shambling, all her fears and defenses adrift in the sly history of his voice."

"The time of spiders arrived. Spiders in high corners of rooms. Cocoons wrapped in spiderwork. Silvery dancing strands that seemed the pure play of light, light as evanescent news, ideas borne on light."

"The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes."

"The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes."

"This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature.... It's what we invented to conceal the terrible secret of our decaying bodies".

"A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?"

"There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze."

"Cars speed beneath us, coming from the west, from out of the towering light, and we watch them as if for a sign, as if they carry on their painted surfaces some residue of the sunset, a barely detectable luster or film of telltale dust."

"He wants to hurry to a lavatory, a zinc-lined room with a bar of untouched oval soap, a torrent of hot water and a swansdown towel that has never been used by anyone else. But of course there is nothing of the kind nearby. Just more germs, an all-pervading medium of pathogens, microbes, floating colonies of spirochetes that fuse and separate and elongate and spiral and engulf, whole trainloads of matter that people cough forth, rudimentary and deadly."

"She walked up the street to her car and felt the liquid pulse of the sun in every step"

"He watched several gulls veering near and saw a hundred other gulls positioned on a slope, all facing the same way, motionless, regardful, joined in consciousness, in beautiful empty birdness, waiting for the signal to fly".

"He looked for a friendly exit, untrucked and rural, and found himself some time later on a two-lane blacktop that wended uncertainly through cattail mires."

"We head out into space, we brave space, line up the launch window and blast off, we swing around the planet in a song. But time binds us to aging flesh."

"We ran through smogged-out hollows past houses stilted over raw defiles and we ran into wooded areas that had the look of tinder, a dry white dusty stillness, a sense of combustible edge, but maybe not - I might have been devising my own newsreel."

" The light from the movie glowed or faded depending on the nature of the scene. He looked at the wall nearest him and then at the other wall and when the light flared and leaped there it all was, the whole tremendous thing, arches, porticos, statues, the urns and marble busts, the vines trained through balusters, the pedestaled heroes with long swords, the columns in the shape of draped figures, both walls crowded with stacked anatomies and structures, too much to take in, and angels that stood halo'd atop the pediments, and he sat there and waited for his father, for the ghost or soul of his father to make a visitation."

"In cities you build a language of circumspection and tact, a thousand little intimations, the nuance that has a shimmer of rubbed bronze. Then you go to the wilderness and become undone, lapsing into babble, eating mushroom caps that implode your brain, that make you preternaturally aware and afraid, turn you into an Aztec bird."

"She didn't know what to call it, a lightness, a waft, something with change in it, treebloom or fragrant rain, and she stood on the stoop and watched a man across the street chip rust from his fire escape, up on the fourth floor."

"Maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard. Look how they come back to us, alight with a kind of brave aging. The windows yield a strong broad desert and enormous sky. The landfill across the road is closed now, jammed to capacity, but gas keeps rising from the great earthen berm, methane, and it produces a wavering across the land and sky that deepens the aura of sacred work. It is like a fable in the writhing air of some ghost civilization, a shimmer of desert ruin. The kids love the machines, the balers and hoppers and long conveyors, and the parents look out the windows through the methane mist and the planes come out of the mountains and align for their approach and the trucks are arrayed in two columns outside the shed, bringing in the unsorted slop, the gut squalor of our lives, and taking the baled and bound units out into the world again, the chunky product blocks, pristine, newsprint for newsprint, tin for tin, and we all feel better when we leave."