[Their love] was full of darkness, it was of a species of parasite that lives within all of us, but that can only feed on certain flesh, flesh that has been injured, infected, gangrened into something that does not look—and is not—altogether human. A parasite that waits, buried deep somewhere in our bodies, for the moment when we become closer to monsters and farther from the men that we are.

By morning in the gray spectral light of a brief and obscure winter sun the fields lay dead-white and touched with a phosphorous glow as if producing illumination of themselves, and the snow was still wisping down thickly, veiling the trees beyond the creek and the mountain itself, falling softly, and softly, faintly sounding in the immense white silence.

Dawn. Fields smoking where the mist shoaled, trees white as bone. The gray shrubbery hard-looking as metal in the morning wetness.

I knew that my mother was real, in a sense: but was she real like the coolness of the air, or like the way that, in its temperature, it made me feel new sensations?

A candle has only so much light.

We are torn between nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.

Each grape contained its bright star, each star its grape.