The walls were lined with books, many of them in foreign languages, like insulation against the immediate present.
The walls of books around him, dense with the past, formed a kind of insulation against the present world and its disasters.
On both sides of the highway I could see the rows of little frame houses, all alike, as if there were only one architect in the city and he had a magnificent obsession.
Flames entered the room like dancers, orange-colored and whirring.
There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure.
Try listening to yourself sometime, alone in a transient room in a strange town. The worst is when you draw a blank, and the ash-blonde ghosts of the past carry on long twittering long-distance calls...