He was trying to scrutinize with my brain.

He was one of a lean body and visage, as if his eager soul, biting for anger at the clog of his body, desired to fret a passage through it.

I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

His eye-stubs reached out toward the Eyes in an attempt to copulate with the stars.

Staring into the face of a corpse is sure to make one question where life is headed.

He felt like a man who, after straining his eyes to peer into the remote distance, finds what he was seeking at his very feet. All his life he had been looking over the heads of those around him, while he had only to look before him without straining his eyes. p 1320

He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he’d been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some particular purpose. For him.

Just suppose that the dead do revisit the living. That something approximately to be described as Jim can return to see how George is making out. Would this be at all satisfactory? Would it even be worthwhile? At best, surely, it would be like the brief visit of an observer from another country who is permitted to peep in for a moment from the vast outdoors of his freedom and see, at a distance, through glass, this figure who sits solitary at the small table in the narrow room, eating his poached eggs humbly and dully, a prisoner for life.

My reading was always a kind of living,” he explained later, “a longing to know some man or men stronger, braver, wiser, wittier, more amusing, or more desperately wicked, than I was, whom I could come to know well and sometimes be friends with.

And what goes on in the head of a walking dead man? Miles wondered. What personal failure could he possibly fear more than death itself?

I should like to penetrate your mind with my own,” he said. “I should like to pierce the mysteries of your soul.

He liked to think of himself as a merciless vivisector probing into the palpitating entrails of his own soul.

There is something about being able to study another man’s body. No sneaking glances or peeks, no pretending to be looking at something else. There is something about the unshielded gaze.

He tried to convey the compulsion to track down and kill that was swallowing him up.