Doe Quotes (page 89)
He's got his cigarette going. He offers her one; this time she takes it. Brief match-flare insider their cupped hands. Red finger-ends. She thinks, Any more flame and we'd see the bones. It's like X-rays. We're just a kind of haze, just coloured water. Water does what it likes. It always goes downhill.
Margaret Atwood
However contradictory the coroner's report? whether he pronounces Consumption or Loneliness or Suicide to be the cause of death? isn't it plain how the true artist-seer actually dies? I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
J. D. Salinger
the map they are using does not indicate the village of Orce, how very inconsiderate on the part of the cartographers, I’ll bet they didn’t forget to indicate their own hometowns, in future they should remember how vexing it is for someone to check out his birthplace on a map only to find a blank space, this has given rise to the gravest of problems for those trying to establish personal and national identities.
Jose Saramago
Can you catch the expression of the Sperm Whale's there? It is the same he died with, only some of the longer wrinkles in the forehead seem now faded away. I think his broad brow to be full of a prairie-like placidity, born of a speculative indifference as to death. But mark the other head's expression. See that amazing lower lip, pressed by accident against the vessel's side, as as firmly to embrace the jaw. Does not this whole head seem to speak of an enormous practical resolution in facing...
Herman Melville
We cannot know his legendary headwith eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torsois still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwisethe curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor coulda smile run through the placid hips and thighsto that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defacedbeneath the translucent cascade of the shouldersand would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: would...
Rainer Maria Rilke