Mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes away: that’s when you get shooting stars.

She was like Marat only with nobody to kill her.

I have the European urge to use my feet when a drive can be dispensed with.

Which arrow flies for ever? The arrow that has hit its mark.

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die.

Look at this tangle of thorns.

There he stood, in the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own nakedness.