“the roads lay under us in white quilts
the telegraph-wires jerked tight and wrote
mantras on the sky”

“The road was frozen. The village lay quiet under the cold sky. Komako hitched up the skirt of her kimono and tucked it into her obi. The moon shone like a blade frozen in blue ice.”

“The howling pariah dogs, the cocks that herald dawn all night, the drumming, the moaning that will be found later white plumage huddled on telegraph wires in back gardens or fowl roosting in apple trees, the eternal sorrow that never sleeps of great Mexico.”

“When people are afraid, people become narcissistic. It is not that people are ‘bad’ for doing this. It is simply that the focus naturally shifts to self-preservation. It is a knee jerk reaction… One that is biologically wired into us.”

“There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired.”

“WE BELIEVE that RAHOWA (RAcial HOly WAr), under the victorious flag of the one and only, true and revolutionary White Racial Religion — Creativity —, is the only road to the resurrection and redemption of the White Race.”

“Praise
the invisible sun burning beyond
the white cold sky, giving us
light and the chimney's shadow.”

“The world which lay under darkness and stillness following the closing of the lid was not the world we know. The event was over. Its devastation lay around about us. The clamoring mind and heart stilled, almost indifferent, certainly disembodied, frail, and exhausted. The hills were hushed, obliterated. Up in the sky, like a crater from some distant cataclysm, was a hollow ring.”

“I read my books at night, like that, under the quilt with the overheated reading lamp. Reading all those good lines while suffocating. It was magic.”

“Men tend to cry, in Landsman's experience, when they have been living for a long time with a sense of rightness and safety, and then they realize that all along just, under their boot, lay the abyss. This is part of the policeman's job, to jerk back the pretty carpet that covers over the deep jagged hole in the floor.”