Patrick Chamoiseau, School Days

The waves were ink. The wind was ink. The vessels were sculpted in ink. Sometimes midnight-blue lightning streaked through the scene. He managed to grab hold of an ink raft.

Jacques Derrida, On Touching--Jean-Luc Nancy

It is the body, it is the heart insofar as it is yours belonging to me, the other heart, the heart of the other, there where the "spiritual" figure, the inherited metonymy, touches this heart, my body, in my body, and can no longer be disassociated from it.

We have to know, when the time comes, how to have a change of heart.

Rachel Cusk, Arlington Park

All night the rain fell on Arlington Park.

The clouds came from the west: clouds like dark cathedrals, clouds like machines, clouds like black blossoms flowering in the arid starlit sky. The came over the English countryside, sunk in its muddled sleep. They came over the low, populous hills where scatterings of lights throbbed in the darkness. At midnight they reached the city, valiantly glittering in its shallow provincial basin. Unseen, they grew like a second city overhead, thickening, expanding, throwing up their savage monuments, their towers, their monstrous, unpeopled palaces of cloud.

Amy Hempel, "Beach Town," The Dog of the Marriage: Stories

I heard them place a bet on the moon. She said waxing, he said waning. Days later, the moon nearly full in the night sky, I listened for the woman to tell her husband she had won, knowing they had not named the terms of the bet, and that the woman next door would collect nothing.

Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy

But I suppose this is consistent with the book's theme that spiritual, not consubstantial, paternity is the important thing.

He did hurtle into the sea, of course.

But in the tricky reverse narration that impels our entwined stories, he was there to catch me when I leapt.

Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

The gentleman removed his cap and unwound from his neck a woolen shawl of rainbow hews such as married men are provided with by their wives, who add to those gifts suitable exhortations about wrapping themselves up. Who does the same for bachelors I cannot say for certain, God only knows: I have never worn such a shawl myself.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

From the first smouldering taper to the elegant lanterns whose lights reverberated around eighteenth-century courtyards and from the mild radiance of these lanterns to the unearthly glow of the sodium lamps that line the Belgian motorways, it has all been combustion.

William L. Fox, Playa Works: The Myth of the Empty

The elevation of a playa may change only inches over many miles; topographical maps of the Black Rock Desert and other playas, such as the Carson Sink, sometimes carry only a single one-foot contour line within the approximately sixty square miles of the entire sheet.

Lucy Corin, "My Favorite Dentist," The Entire Predicament

Home is not far but it takes a long time with all the lights. Also, because of the sniper, a lot of people are trying to drive with their heads ducked.

Deb Olin Unferth, "La Peña," Minor Robberies

As we walked off I tripped over his can. It was rusty and aluminum and had a piece of string attached to it, and he held the string's other end. Toy? I don't know. I shouldn't name it. It was his.