It was a leap into the other.

Some kinds of order were too vast for a human to know. But below the chaos of a single human life, you could trust that a cosmic breve was sounding.

Other people had religion to give them a connection to eternity, and good luck to them, but religion was too narrow for her, too unforgiving, too literal. Literature encompassed everything, forbade nothing, endorsed nothing. Writers, like scientists, had the greatest respect for the world as it truly was. Their job wasn’t to judge but to examine, to experiment, draft after draft, century after century.

Many things in this place were bewildering, but the feel of her body was still the thing he knew best in all the world.

You were alive for such a short time and then you went back into the great silence. The only ones who didn’t vanish were the artists. While you were reading their words and looking at their pictures they were still alive, and you shared some of their life too.

The dragons of twentieth-century life are ignorance, incompetence, slackness and disloyalty, she said.

Standing in the dusk watching the great yellow eye of the tram light rushing towards her, she understood why some words were worth binding in leather and handing on. In the darkest hour, all the other humans who’d known dark hours were there with you. They’d been to the dark places before you, and they were with you now.

It was a long time since whe’s been young and it was unlikely that she’d ever been lovely. She stood like a man, square-on. Her breasts pushed out the old tee-shirt, but it was clear from the way she stood that she’d forgotten about breasts being sexy. Her breasts made bulges in her shirt, the same way her knees made bulges in her black track pants, that was all.

He had seen God in the night sky long before he understood its patterns.

Ain’t nothing in this world just for the taking... A man got to pay a fair price for taking... Matter of give a little, take a little.