“And so I set these things down before the onset of the first of a thousand small physical degradations as, in a still-distant suburb, Death strides whistling towards me.”

“I said to Mauve: Do you approve of my coming here for a month or so and troubling you for some advice now and then, after that time I will have over come the first 'petites miseres' of painting... Well, Mauve at once set me down before a still life of a pair of old wooden shoes and some other objects, and so I could set to work.”

“The prison of life and the bondage of grief are one and the same.
Before the onset of death, why should man expect to be free of grief?”

“I remembered Albany […] as just another down-on-its-luck small American city that had sacrificed its vitality to a whirring ring of homogenous suburbs.”

“This swirl of stars,' Draconus suddenly said, 'marks the plunge of light into darkness. These stars, they are distant suns, shihing their light down upon distant, unknown worlds. Worlds, perhaps, little different from this one. Or vastly different. It hardly matters. Each star swirls its path towards the centre, and at that centre is death - the death of light, the death of time itself.”

“Four hoarse blasts of a ship’s whistle still raise the hair on my neck and set my feet to tapping.”

“It's strange to be so physically close to someone who's so distant”

“I regard the death and mangling of a couple thousand men as a small affair, a kind of morning dash — and it may be well that we become so hardened.”

“There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath
Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death.”

“Everywhere — all over Africa and South America … you see these suburbs springing up. They represent the optimum of what people want. There's a certain sort of logic leading towards these immaculate suburbs. And they're terrifying, because they are the death of the soul … This is the prison this planet is being turned into.”