He smoked a cigarette, standing in the dark and listening to her undress. She made sea sounds; something flapped like a sail; there was the creak of ropes; then he heard the wave-against-a-wharf smack of rubber on flesh. Her call for him to hurry was a sea-moan, and when he lay beside her, she heaved, tidal, moon-driven.

But whether he was happy or not was hard to say. Probably he was neither, just as a plant is neither.

He felt as though his heart were a bomb, a complicated bomb that would result in a simple explosion, wrecking the world without rocking it.

Like a dead man, only friction could make him warm or violence make him mobile.

Every child, everywhere; in the whole world there was not one child who was not gravely, sweetly dancing.

He thought of how calm he was. His calm was so perfect that he could not destroy it even by being conscious of it.

Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily.