“An old woman wept among the white faces. Two men carrying a body. An old dog crawling on his belly, dragging his hind legs. Several bodies in the corner of the lot, beside a shed, blood-soaked sheets covering them. An ambulance.”

“But now in the last two weeks of his stray year the little dog had added a house on another road to his nightly rounds. A house where two old people lived with a toothless, rheumatic old hound. The hound was too toothless to gnaw his bones, too old and weary with life to bury his bones. But still the old hound obeyed his dog instincts and shoved his bones under an old burlap bag against the wall of a shed where he lay during the day sunning his rheumatic joints. And the little dog knew.”

“A woman shaking in fear from demons in her mind, and the old man who loves her more deeply than life itself, crying softly in the corner, his face in his hands.”

“He has the wisdom of an old man, but his body is at its prime”

“A Hebrew knelt in the dying light,
His eye was dim and cold,
The hairs on his brow were silver-white,
And his blood was thin and old.”

“I am that last, that
final thing, the body
in a white sheet listening”

“The man was fat. His belly arrived like an advance guard, heralding the bulk to come, huge shoulders, a surplus chin. His white cassock had settled over his body like a tarpaulin dropped on a blimp.”

“The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.”

“He wept, and it felt as if the tears were cleansing him, as if his body needed to empty itself.”

“Not body enough to cover his mind decently with; his intellect is improperly exposed.”