For hours, for days, for years, she had wandered endlessly within herself but never met anybody, nobody.

I will tell you what Jeanne was like. She was like a piano in a country where everyone has had their hands cut off.

Drosselmeier had unwittingly exposed himself to an overdose of reality, and it had destroyed his reason.

Cats of all kinds weave in and out of the text; Burroughs has clearly taken to them in a big way in his old age and seems torn between a fear they will betray him into sentimentality and a resigned acceptance that a man can't be ironic all the time.

Spindly branches of buttercups were secreted among gleaming stems still moist at the roots from last night's rain that had washedand refreshed the entire wood, had dowered it in poignant transparency, the unique, inconsolable quality of rainy countries, as if all was glimpsed through tears.

Those are the voices of my brothers, darling; I love the company of wolves.

A mother is always a mother, since a mother is a biological fact, whilst a father is a movable feast.